Quantization of Binary-Input Discrete Memoryless Channels

The quantization of the output of a binary-input discrete memoryless channel to a smaller number of levels is considered. An algorithm which finds an optimal quantizer, in the sense of maximizing mutual information between the channel input and the quantizer output is given. This result holds for arbitrary channels, in contrast to previous results for restricted channels or a restricted number of quantizer outputs. In the worst case, the algorithm complexity is cubic $M^3$ in the number of channel outputs $M$. Optimality is proved using the theorem of Burshtein, Della Pietra, Kanevsky, and N\'adas for mappings which minimize average impurity for classification and regression trees.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures. Source code available at http://brian.kurkoski.org

Greedy-Merge Degrading has Optimal Power-Law

Consider a channel with a given input distribution. Our aim is to degrade it to a channel with at most L output letters. One such degradation method is the so called "greedy-merge" algorithm. We derive an upper bound on the reduction in mutual information between input and output. For fixed input alphabet size and variable L, the upper bound is within a constant factor of an algorithm-independent lower bound. Thus, we establish that greedy-merge is optimal in the power-law sense.Comment: 5 pages, submitted to ISIT 201

Joint Quantizer Optimization based on Neural Quantizer for Sum-Product Decoder

A low-precision analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is required to implement a frontend device of wideband digital communication systems in order to reduce its power consumption. The goal of this paper is to present a novel joint quantizer optimization method for minimizing lower-precision quantizers matched to the sum-product algorithms. The principal idea is to introduce a quantizer that includes a feed-forward neural network and the soft staircase function. Since the soft staircase function is differentiable and has non-zero gradient values everywhere, we can exploit backpropagation and a stochastic gradient descent method to train the feed-forward neural network in the quantizer. The expected loss regarding the channel input and the decoder output is minimized in a supervised training phase. The experimental results indicate that the joint quantizer optimization method successfully provides an 8-level quantizer for a low-density parity-check (LDPC) code that achieves only a 0.1-dB performance loss compared to the unquantized system.Comment: 6 page

On the Construction of Polar Codes for Channels with Moderate Input Alphabet Sizes

Current deterministic algorithms for the construction of polar codes can only be argued to be practical for channels with small input alphabet sizes. In this paper, we show that any construction algorithm for channels with moderate input alphabet size which follows the paradigm of "degrading after each polarization step" will inherently be impractical with respect to a certain "hard" underlying channel. This result also sheds light on why the construction of LDPC codes using density evolution is impractical for channels with moderate sized input alphabets.Comment: 9 page

Single-bit Quantization Capacity of Binary-input Continuous-output Channels

We consider a channel with discrete binary input X that is corrupted by a given continuous noise to produce a continuous-valued output Y. A quantizer is then used to quantize the continuous-valued output Y to the final binary output Z. The goal is to design an optimal quantizer Q* and also find the optimal input distribution p*(X) that maximizes the mutual information I(X; Z) between the binary input and the binary quantized output. A linear time complexity searching procedure is proposed. Based on the properties of the optimal quantizer and the optimal input distribution, we reduced the searching range that results in a faster implementation algorithm. Both theoretical and numerical results are provided to illustrate our method.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2001.0183

Categorical Feature Compression via Submodular Optimization

In the era of big data, learning from categorical features with very large vocabularies (e.g., 28 million for the Criteo click prediction dataset) has become a practical challenge for machine learning researchers and practitioners. We design a highly-scalable vocabulary compression algorithm that seeks to maximize the mutual information between the compressed categorical feature and the target binary labels and we furthermore show that its solution is guaranteed to be within a $1-1/e \approx 63\%$ factor of the global optimal solution. To achieve this, we introduce a novel re-parametrization of the mutual information objective, which we prove is submodular, and design a data structure to query the submodular function in amortized $O(\log n )$ time (where $n$ is the input vocabulary size). Our complete algorithm is shown to operate in $O(n \log n )$ time. Additionally, we design a distributed implementation in which the query data structure is decomposed across $O(k)$ machines such that each machine only requires $O(\frac n k)$ space, while still preserving the approximation guarantee and using only logarithmic rounds of computation. We also provide analysis of simple alternative heuristic compression methods to demonstrate they cannot achieve any approximation guarantee. Using the large-scale Criteo learning task, we demonstrate better performance in retaining mutual information and also verify competitive learning performance compared to other baseline methods.Comment: Accepted to ICML 2019. Authors are listed in alphabetical orde

Deep Log-Likelihood Ratio Quantization

In this work, a deep learning-based method for log-likelihood ratio (LLR) lossy compression and quantization is proposed, with emphasis on a single-input single-output uncorrelated fading communication setting. A deep autoencoder network is trained to compress, quantize and reconstruct the bit log-likelihood ratios corresponding to a single transmitted symbol. Specifically, the encoder maps to a latent space with dimension equal to the number of sufficient statistics required to recover the inputs - equal to three in this case - while the decoder aims to reconstruct a noisy version of the latent representation with the purpose of modeling quantization effects in a differentiable way. Simulation results show that, when applied to a standard rate-1/2 low-density parity-check (LDPC) code, a finite precision compression factor of nearly three times is achieved when storing an entire codeword, with an incurred loss of performance lower than 0.1 dB compared to straightforward scalar quantization of the log-likelihood ratios.Comment: Accepted for publication at EUSIPCO 2019. Camera-ready versio

Communication-Channel Optimized Partition

Given an original discrete source X with the distribution p_X that is corrupted by noise to produce the noisy data Y with the given joint distribution p(X, Y). A quantizer/classifier Q : Y -> Z is then used to classify/quantize the data Y to the discrete partitioned output Z with probability distribution p_Z. Next, Z is transmitted over a deterministic channel with a given channel matrix A that produces the final discrete output T. One wants to design the optimal quantizer/classifier Q^* such that the cost function F(X; T) between the input X and the final output T is minimized while the probability of the partitioned output Z satisfies a concave constraint G(p_Z) < C. Our results generalized some famous previous results. First, an iteration linear time complexity algorithm is proposed to find the local optimal quantizer. Second, we show that the optimal partition should produce a hard partition that is equivalent to the cuts by hyper-planes in the probability space of the posterior probability p(X|Y). This result finally provides a polynomial-time algorithm to find the globally optimal quantizer.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

Entropy-Constrained Maximizing Mutual Information Quantization

In this paper, we investigate the quantization of the output of a binary input discrete memoryless channel that maximizing the mutual information between the input and the quantized output under an entropy-constrained of the quantized output. A polynomial time algorithm is introduced that can find the truly global optimal quantizer. These results hold for binary input channels with an arbitrary number of quantized output. Finally, we extend these results to binary input continuous output channels and show a sufficient condition such that a single threshold quantizer is an optimal quantizer. Both theoretical results and numerical results are provided to justify our techniques

LDPC Decoding with Limited-Precision Soft Information in Flash Memories

This paper investigates the application of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes to Flash memories. Multiple cell reads with distinct word-line voltages provide limited-precision soft information for the LDPC decoder. The values of the word-line voltages (also called reference voltages) are optimized by maximizing the mutual information (MI) between the input and output of the multiple-read channel. Constraining the maximum mutual-information (MMI) quantization to enforce a constant-ratio constraint provides a significant simplification with no noticeable loss in performance. Our simulation results suggest that for a well-designed LDPC code, the quantization that maximizes the mutual information will also minimize the frame error rate. However, care must be taken to design the code to perform well in the quantized channel. An LDPC code designed for a full-precision Gaussian channel may perform poorly in the quantized setting. Our LDPC code designs provide an example where quantization increases the importance of absorbing sets thus changing how the LDPC code should be optimized. Simulation results show that small increases in precision enable the LDPC code to significantly outperform a BCH code with comparable rate and block length (but without the benefit of the soft information) over a range of frame error rates