Burrows-Wheeler transform and Run-Length Enconding

In this paper we study the clustering effect of the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) from a combinatorial viewpoint. In particular, given a word w we define the BWT-clustering ratio of w as the ratio between the number of clusters produced by BWT and the number of the clusters of w. The number of clusters of a word is measured by its Run-Length Encoding. We show that the BWT-clustering ratio ranges in ]0,2]. Moreover, given a rational number r in ]0,2], it is possible to find infinitely many words having BWT-clustering ratio equal to r. Finally, we show how the words can be classified according to their BWT-clustering ratio. The behavior of such a parameter is studied for very well-known families of binary words.