Table 1.

Glossary of terms

Term	Definition
Bit-pattern observable	The run of 0 s in a binary string
Bit vector	An array data structure that holds bits
Canonical k-mer	The smallest hash value between a k-mer and its reverse complement
Hash function	A function that takes input data of arbitrary size and maps it to a bit string that is of fixed size and typically smaller than the input
Jaccard similarity	A similarity measure defined as the intersection of sets, divided by their union
K-mer decomposition	The process of extracting all sub-sequences of length k from a sequence
Minimizer	The smallest hash value in a set
Multiset	A set that allows for multiple instances of each of its elements (i.e. element frequency)
Register	A quickly accessible bit vector used to hold information
Sketch	A compact data structure that approximates a data set
Stochastic averaging	A process used to reduce the variance of an estimator