• compressed data structures
• data compression
• algorithm engineering
• algorithms

This thesis revisits two fundamental problems in data structure design: predecessor search and rank/select primitives. These problems are pervasive in applications, particularly in areas such as database systems, search engines, bioinformatics, and Internet routing.
We show that real data present a peculiar kind of regularity that can be explained in terms of geometric considerations. We name it "approximate linearity" and analyse its algorithmic effectiveness in a variety of possible input data distributions. We then expand the horizon of compressed data structures by presenting solutions for the problems above that discover, or "learn", in a rigorous and efficient algorithmic way, the approximate linearities present in the data. In addition, we show how to combine this new form of compressibility with the classic repetition-aware approaches thus introducing a new class of compressed indexes. We accompany our theoretical results with implementations and experiments on large amounts of data, and we show that, compared to several well-engineered known compressed indexes, our data structures provide improvements in time, in space or both (often of orders of magnitude).