Weighted Adaptive Coding

Huffman coding is known to be optimal, yet its dynamic version may be even more efficient in practice. A new variant of Huffman encoding has been proposed recently, that provably always performs better than static Huffman coding by at least \(m-1\) bits, where \(m\) denotes the size of the alphabet,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inarXiv.org
Main Authors Fruchtman, Aharon, Gross, Yoav, Klein, Shmuel T, Shapira, Dana
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published Ithaca Cornell University Library, arXiv.org 17.05.2020
Subjects
Arithmetic coding
Huffman codes
Statistical methods
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Summary:Huffman coding is known to be optimal, yet its dynamic version may be even more efficient in practice. A new variant of Huffman encoding has been proposed recently, that provably always performs better than static Huffman coding by at least \(m-1\) bits, where \(m\) denotes the size of the alphabet, and has a better worst case than the standard dynamic Huffman coding. This paper introduces a new generic coding method, extending the known static and dynamic variants and including them as special cases. In fact, the generalization is applicable to all statistical methods, including arithmetic coding. This leads then to the formalization of a new adaptive coding method, which is provably always at least as good as the best dynamic variant known to date. Moreover, we present empirical results that show improvements over static and dynamic Huffman and arithmetic coding achieved by the proposed method, even when the encoded file includes the model description.
ISSN:2331-8422