Compact directed acyclic word graphs (CDAWGs) Blumer et al. 1987 are a fundamental data structure on strings with applications in text pattern searching, data compression, and pattern discovery. Intuitively, the CDAWG of a string T is obtained by merging isomorphic subtrees of the suffix tree Weiner 1973 of the same string T, and thus CDAWGs are a compact indexing structure. Indeed, the CDAWG size 𝖾 can be sublinear in n for some highly repetitive strings. Of its various applications, the CDAWG allows for computing pattern occurrences, maximal exact matches (MEMs), minimal absent words (MAWs), and minimal unique substrings (MUSs) in optimal time using O(𝖾) space. For designing space-efficient data storage, it is crucial that the underlying data structure is robust against data edits and errors. As a mathematical measure for this, the notion of compression sensitivity Akagi et al. 2023 was introduced as the maximum of the size increase in the compressed data structures after edits operations. In this paper, we investigate the sensitivity of CDAWGs when a single character edit operation is performed at an arbitrary position in the input string T. We show that the size of the CDAWG after an edit operation on T is asymptotically at most 8 times larger than the original CDAWG before the edit. This O(1) upper bound significantly improves on the only known upper bound O(n/log n) for the problem.
Hamai et al. (Thu,) studied this question.