500 research outputs found
A Progressive Universal Noiseless Coder
The authors combine pruned tree-structured vector quantization (pruned TSVQ) with Itoh's (1987) universal noiseless coder. By combining pruned TSVQ with universal noiseless coding, they benefit from the “successive approximation” capabilities of TSVQ, thereby allowing progressive transmission of images, while retaining the ability to noiselessly encode images of unknown statistics in a provably asymptotically optimal fashion. Noiseless compression results are comparable to Ziv-Lempel and arithmetic coding for both images and finely quantized Gaussian sources
Minimum Rates of Approximate Sufficient Statistics
Given a sufficient statistic for a parametric family of distributions, one
can estimate the parameter without access to the data. However, the memory or
code size for storing the sufficient statistic may nonetheless still be
prohibitive. Indeed, for independent samples drawn from a -nomial
distribution with degrees of freedom, the length of the code scales as
. In many applications, we may not have a useful notion of
sufficient statistics (e.g., when the parametric family is not an exponential
family) and we also may not need to reconstruct the generating distribution
exactly. By adopting a Shannon-theoretic approach in which we allow a small
error in estimating the generating distribution, we construct various {\em
approximate sufficient statistics} and show that the code length can be reduced
to . We consider errors measured according to the
relative entropy and variational distance criteria. For the code constructions,
we leverage Rissanen's minimum description length principle, which yields a
non-vanishing error measured according to the relative entropy. For the
converse parts, we use Clarke and Barron's formula for the relative entropy of
a parametrized distribution and the corresponding mixture distribution.
However, this method only yields a weak converse for the variational distance.
We develop new techniques to achieve vanishing errors and we also prove strong
converses. The latter means that even if the code is allowed to have a
non-vanishing error, its length must still be at least .Comment: To appear in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor
Arithmetic coding revisited
Over the last decade, arithmetic coding has emerged as an important compression tool. It is now the method of choice for adaptive coding on multisymbol alphabets because of its speed,
low storage requirements, and effectiveness of compression. This article describes a new implementation of arithmetic coding that incorporates several improvements over a widely used earlier version by Witten, Neal, and Cleary, which has become a de facto standard. These improvements include fewer multiplicative operations, greatly extended range of alphabet sizes and symbol probabilities, and the use of low-precision arithmetic, permitting implementation by fast shift/add operations. We also describe a modular structure that separates the coding, modeling, and probability estimation components of a compression system. To motivate the improved coder, we consider the needs of a word-based text compression program. We report a range of experimental results using this and other models. Complete source code is available
Applying MDL to Learning Best Model Granularity
The Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle is solidly based on a provably
ideal method of inference using Kolmogorov complexity. We test how the theory
behaves in practice on a general problem in model selection: that of learning
the best model granularity. The performance of a model depends critically on
the granularity, for example the choice of precision of the parameters. Too
high precision generally involves modeling of accidental noise and too low
precision may lead to confusion of models that should be distinguished. This
precision is often determined ad hoc. In MDL the best model is the one that
most compresses a two-part code of the data set: this embodies ``Occam's
Razor.'' In two quite different experimental settings the theoretical value
determined using MDL coincides with the best value found experimentally. In the
first experiment the task is to recognize isolated handwritten characters in
one subject's handwriting, irrespective of size and orientation. Based on a new
modification of elastic matching, using multiple prototypes per character, the
optimal prediction rate is predicted for the learned parameter (length of
sampling interval) considered most likely by MDL, which is shown to coincide
with the best value found experimentally. In the second experiment the task is
to model a robot arm with two degrees of freedom using a three layer
feed-forward neural network where we need to determine the number of nodes in
the hidden layer giving best modeling performance. The optimal model (the one
that extrapolizes best on unseen examples) is predicted for the number of nodes
in the hidden layer considered most likely by MDL, which again is found to
coincide with the best value found experimentally.Comment: LaTeX, 32 pages, 5 figures. Artificial Intelligence journal, To
appea
Substructure Discovery Using Minimum Description Length and Background Knowledge
The ability to identify interesting and repetitive substructures is an
essential component to discovering knowledge in structural data. We describe a
new version of our SUBDUE substructure discovery system based on the minimum
description length principle. The SUBDUE system discovers substructures that
compress the original data and represent structural concepts in the data. By
replacing previously-discovered substructures in the data, multiple passes of
SUBDUE produce a hierarchical description of the structural regularities in the
data. SUBDUE uses a computationally-bounded inexact graph match that identifies
similar, but not identical, instances of a substructure and finds an
approximate measure of closeness of two substructures when under computational
constraints. In addition to the minimum description length principle, other
background knowledge can be used by SUBDUE to guide the search towards more
appropriate substructures. Experiments in a variety of domains demonstrate
SUBDUE's ability to find substructures capable of compressing the original data
and to discover structural concepts important to the domain. Description of
Online Appendix: This is a compressed tar file containing the SUBDUE discovery
system, written in C. The program accepts as input databases represented in
graph form, and will output discovered substructures with their corresponding
value.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for an online appendix and other files
accompanying this articl
Minimum Description Length Induction, Bayesianism, and Kolmogorov Complexity
The relationship between the Bayesian approach and the minimum description
length approach is established. We sharpen and clarify the general modeling
principles MDL and MML, abstracted as the ideal MDL principle and defined from
Bayes's rule by means of Kolmogorov complexity. The basic condition under which
the ideal principle should be applied is encapsulated as the Fundamental
Inequality, which in broad terms states that the principle is valid when the
data are random, relative to every contemplated hypothesis and also these
hypotheses are random relative to the (universal) prior. Basically, the ideal
principle states that the prior probability associated with the hypothesis
should be given by the algorithmic universal probability, and the sum of the
log universal probability of the model plus the log of the probability of the
data given the model should be minimized. If we restrict the model class to the
finite sets then application of the ideal principle turns into Kolmogorov's
minimal sufficient statistic. In general we show that data compression is
almost always the best strategy, both in hypothesis identification and
prediction.Comment: 35 pages, Latex. Submitted IEEE Trans. Inform. Theor
The Minimum Description Length Principle and Model Selection in Spectropolarimetry
It is shown that the two-part Minimum Description Length Principle can be
used to discriminate among different models that can explain a given observed
dataset. The description length is chosen to be the sum of the lengths of the
message needed to encode the model plus the message needed to encode the data
when the model is applied to the dataset. It is verified that the proposed
principle can efficiently distinguish the model that correctly fits the
observations while avoiding over-fitting. The capabilities of this criterion
are shown in two simple problems for the analysis of observed
spectropolarimetric signals. The first is the de-noising of observations with
the aid of the PCA technique. The second is the selection of the optimal number
of parameters in LTE inversions. We propose this criterion as a quantitative
approach for distinguising the most plausible model among a set of proposed
models. This quantity is very easy to implement as an additional output on the
existing inversion codes.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journa
- …