Top-k Frequent Patterns in Streams and Parameterized-Space LZ Compression

We present novel online approximations of the Lempel-Ziv 77 (LZ77) and Lempel-Ziv 78 (LZ78) compression schemes [Lempel & Ziv, 1977/1978] with parameterizable space usage based on estimating which k patterns occur the most frequently in the streamed input for parameter k. This new approach overcomes the issue of finding only local repetitions, which is a natural limitation of algorithms that compress using a sliding window or by partitioning the input into blocks. For this, we introduce the top-k trie, a summary for maintaining online the top-k frequent consecutive patterns in a stream of characters based on a combination of the Lempel-Ziv 78 compression scheme and the Misra-Gries algorithm for frequent item estimation in streams. Using straightforward encoding, our implementations yield compression ratios (output over input size) competitive with established general-purpose LZ-based compression utilities such as gzip or xz.