Morphisms and BWT-Run Sensitivity

Abstract

We study how the application of morphisms affects the number r of equal-letter runs in the Burrows–Wheeler Transform (BWT). This parameter has emerged as a key repetitiveness measure in compressed indexing. We focus on the notion of BWT-run sensitivity after application of morphisms. For binary alphabets, we characterize the class of injective morphisms that preserve the number of BWT-runs up to a bounded additive increase by showing that it coincides with the known class of primitivity-preserving morphisms, which are those that map primitive words to primitive words. We further prove that deciding whether a given binary morphism has bounded BWT-run sensitivity is possible in polynomial time with respect to the total length of the images of the two letters. Additionally, we explore new structural and combinatorial properties of synchronizing and recognizable morphisms. These results establish new connections between BWT-based compressibility, code theory, and symbolic dynamics.