On optimally partitioning a text to improve its compression

In this paper we investigate the problem of partitioning an input string T in such a way that compressing individually its parts via a base-compressor C gets a compressed output that is shorter than applying C over the entire T at once. This problem was introduced in Buchsbaum et al. (Proc. of 11th ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, pp. 175-184, 2000; J. ACM 50(6):825-851, 2003) in the context of table compression, and then further elaborated and extended to strings and trees by Ferragina et al. (J. ACM 52:688-713, 2005; Proc. of 46th IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, pp. 184-193, 2005) and Mäkinen and Navarro (Proc. of 14th Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval, pp. 229-241, 2007). Unfortunately, the literature offers poor solutions: namely, we know either a cubic-time algorithm for computing the optimal partition based on dynamic programming (Buchsbaum et al. in J. ACM 50(6):825-851, 2003; Giancarlo and Sciortino in Proc. of 14th Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, pp. 129-143, 2003), or few heuristics that do not guarantee any bounds on the efficacy of their computed partition (Buchsbaum et al. in Proc. of 11th ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, pp. 175-184, 2000; J. ACM 50(6):825-851, 2003), or algorithms that are efficient but work in some specific scenarios (such as the Burrows-Wheeler Transform, see e.g. Ferragina et al. in J. ACM 52:688-713, 2005; Mäkinen and Navarro in Proc. of 14th Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval, pp. 229-241, 2007) and achieve compression performance that might be worse than the optimal-partitioning by a Ω(log n/log log n) factor. Therefore, computing efficiently the optimal solution is still open (Buchsbaum and Giancarlo in Encyclopedia of Algorithms, pp. 939-942, 2008). In this paper we provide the first algorithm which computes in O(nlog 1+ε n) time and O(n) space, a partition of T whose compressed output is guarantee