Encoding Two-Dimensional Range Top-k Queries

We consider the problem of encoding two-dimensional arrays, whose elements come from a total order, for answering $${\text{Top-}}{k}$$ Top- k queries. The aim is to obtain encodings that use space close to the information-theoretic lower bound, which can be constructed efficiently. For an $$m \times n$$ m × n array, with $$m \le n$$ m ≤ n , we first propose an encoding for answering 1-sided $${\textsf {Top}}{\text {-}}k{}$$ Top - k queries, whose query range is restricted to $$[1 \dots m][1 \dots a]$$ [ 1 ⋯ m ] [ 1 ⋯ a ] , for $$1 \le a \le n$$ 1 ≤ a ≤ n . Next, we propose an encoding for answering for the general (4-sided) $${\textsf {Top}}{\text {-}}k{}$$ Top - k queries that takes $$(m\lg {{(k+1)n \atopwithdelims ()n}}+2nm(m-1)+o(n))$$ ( m lg ( k + 1 ) n n + 2 n m ( m - 1 ) + o ( n ) ) bits, which generalizes the joint Cartesian tree of Golin et al. [TCS 2016]. Compared with trivial $$O(nm\lg {n})$$ O ( n m lg n ) -bit encoding, our encoding takes less space when $$m = o(\lg {n})$$ m = o ( lg n ) . In addition to the upper bound results for the encodings, we also give lower bounds on encodings for answering 1 and 4-sided $${\textsf {Top}}{\text {-}}k{}$$ Top - k queries, which show that our upper bound results are almost optimal.