Sequence binary decision diagram: Minimization, relationship to acyclic automata, and complexities of Boolean set operations

The manipulation of large sequence data is one of the most important problems in string processing. In this paper, we discuss a new data structure for storing and manipulating sets of strings, called Sequence Binary Decision Diagrams (sequence BDDs), which has recently been introduced by Loekito et al. (2010) as a descendant of both acyclic DFAs (ADFAs) and binary decision diagrams (BDDs). Sequence BDDs can compactly represent sets of sequences similarly to minimal ADFAs, and allow efficient set operations inherited from BDDs. We study fundamental properties of sequence BDDs, such as the characterization of minimal sequence BDDs by reduced sequence BDDs, non-trivial relationships between sizes of minimal sequence BDDs and minimal ADFAs, the complexities of minimization, Boolean set operations, and sequence BDD construction. We also show experimental results for real and artificial data sets.