The Zero-Undetected-Error Capacity Approaches the Sperner Capacity

Ahlswede, Cai, and Zhang proved that, in the noise-free limit, the zero-undetected-error capacity is lower bounded by the Sperner capacity of the channel graph, and they conjectured equality. Here we derive an upper bound that proves the conjecture.Comment: 8 Pages; added a section on the definition of Sperner capacity; accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Active sequential hypothesis testing

Consider a decision maker who is responsible to dynamically collect observations so as to enhance his information about an underlying phenomena of interest in a speedy manner while accounting for the penalty of wrong declaration. Due to the sequential nature of the problem, the decision maker relies on his current information state to adaptively select the most ``informative'' sensing action among the available ones. In this paper, using results in dynamic programming, lower bounds for the optimal total cost are established. The lower bounds characterize the fundamental limits on the maximum achievable information acquisition rate and the optimal reliability. Moreover, upper bounds are obtained via an analysis of two heuristic policies for dynamic selection of actions. It is shown that the first proposed heuristic achieves asymptotic optimality, where the notion of asymptotic optimality, due to Chernoff, implies that the relative difference between the total cost achieved by the proposed policy and the optimal total cost approaches zero as the penalty of wrong declaration (hence the number of collected samples) increases. The second heuristic is shown to achieve asymptotic optimality only in a limited setting such as the problem of a noisy dynamic search. However, by considering the dependency on the number of hypotheses, under a technical condition, this second heuristic is shown to achieve a nonzero information acquisition rate, establishing a lower bound for the maximum achievable rate and error exponent. In the case of a noisy dynamic search with size-independent noise, the obtained nonzero rate and error exponent are shown to be maximum.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AOS1144 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Error-and-Erasure Decoding for Block Codes with Feedback

Inner and outer bounds are derived on the optimal performance of fixed length block codes on discrete memoryless channels with feedback and errors-and-erasures decoding. First an inner bound is derived using a two phase encoding scheme with communication and control phases together with the optimal decoding rule for the given encoding scheme, among decoding rules that can be represented in terms of pairwise comparisons between the messages. Then an outer bound is derived using a generalization of the straight-line bound to errors-and-erasures decoders and the optimal error exponent trade off of a feedback encoder with two messages. In addition upper and lower bounds are derived, for the optimal erasure exponent of error free block codes in terms of the rate. Finally we present a proof of the fact that the optimal trade off between error exponents of a two message code does not increase with feedback on DMCs.Comment: 33 pages, 1 figure

Bit-wise Unequal Error Protection for Variable Length Block Codes with Feedback

The bit-wise unequal error protection problem, for the case when the number of groups of bits $\ell$ is fixed, is considered for variable length block codes with feedback. An encoding scheme based on fixed length block codes with erasures is used to establish inner bounds to the achievable performance for finite expected decoding time. A new technique for bounding the performance of variable length block codes is used to establish outer bounds to the performance for a given expected decoding time. The inner and the outer bounds match one another asymptotically and characterize the achievable region of rate-exponent vectors, completely. The single message message-wise unequal error protection problem for variable length block codes with feedback is also solved as a necessary step on the way.Comment: 41 pages, 3 figure

The Sphere Packing Bound via Augustin's Method

A sphere packing bound (SPB) with a prefactor that is polynomial in the block length $n$ is established for codes on a length $n$ product channel $W_{[1,n]}$ assuming that the maximum order $1/2$ Renyi capacity among the component channels, i.e. $\max_{t\in[1,n]} C_{1/2,W_{t}}$, is $\mathit{O}(\ln n)$. The reliability function of the discrete stationary product channels with feedback is bounded from above by the sphere packing exponent. Both results are proved by first establishing a non-asymptotic SPB. The latter result continues to hold under a milder stationarity hypothesis.Comment: 30 pages. An error in the statement of Lemma 2 is corrected. The change is inconsequential for the rest of the pape