5 research outputs found
About adaptive coding on countable alphabets
This paper sheds light on universal coding with respect to classes of
memoryless sources over a countable alphabet defined by an envelope function
with finite and non-decreasing hazard rate. We prove that the auto-censuring AC
code introduced by Bontemps (2011) is adaptive with respect to the collection
of such classes. The analysis builds on the tight characterization of universal
redundancy rate in terms of metric entropy % of small source classes by Opper
and Haussler (1997) and on a careful analysis of the performance of the
AC-coding algorithm. The latter relies on non-asymptotic bounds for maxima of
samples from discrete distributions with finite and non-decreasing hazard rate