FAW: Flag aligned word-based encoding for in-place integers compression

Abstract

FAW-encoding is an open-source C library that facilitates a memory efficient compression of an array of integers. An integer in an array either lags behind or never exceeds its original place in that array after encoded by FAW-encoding. Therefore, FAW-encoding causes in-place compression of an array of integers that never needs memory allocation to store the encoded data. Due to these special properties, FAW-encoding optimizes algorithms, such as, graph mining and joining, that generally produce large intermediate results. Besides encoding, the open-source C library comprises with methods for decoding or searching an encoded array and intersecting and merging encoded arrays.