An extension of the Burrows Wheeler Transform and applications to sequence comparison and data compression

Abstract

We introduce a generalization of the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) that can be applied to a multiset of words. The extended transformation, denoted by E, is reversible, but, differently from BWT, it is also surjective. The E transformation allows to give a definition of distance between two sequences, that we apply here to the problem of the whole mitochondrial genome phylogeny. Moreover we give some consideration about compressing a set of words by using the E transformation as preprocessing.