NeuroCOLT

Neural Networks and Computational Learning Theory

 

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NeuroCOLT Technical Report NC-TR-96-033

Learning to Compress Ergodic Sources

Jonathan Baxter
Royal Holloway, University of London and
London School of Economics
UK

John Shawe-Taylor
Royal Holloway, University of London
UK

Abstract
We present an adaptive coding technique which is shown to achieve the optimal coding in the limit as the size of the text grows, while the data structures associated with the code only grow linearly with the text. The approach relies on Huffman codes which are generated relative to the context in which a particular character occurs. The Huffman codes themselves are inferred from the data that has already been seen. A key part of the paper involves showing that the loss per character incurred by the learning process tends to zero as the size of the text tends to infinity.

 

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