MO1.R4.3

Better Algorithms for Constructing Minimum Cost Markov Chains and AIFV Codes

Mordecai Golin, UMass Amherst, United States; Reza Hosseini Dolatabadi, Arian Zamani, Sharif University of Technology, Iran

Session:
Lossless Source Coding

Track:
10: Source Coding and Data Compression

Location:
Omikron II

Presentation Time:
Mon, 8 Jul, 10:45 - 11:05

Session Chair:
Tamas Linder, Queen's University
Abstract
Almost Instantaneous Fixed to Variable (AIFV) coding is a relatively new method of lossless coding that, unlike Huffman coding, uses more than one coding tree. The problem of constructing optimal AIFV codes is a special case of that of constructing minimum cost Markov chains. This paper provides the first complete proof of correctness for the previously known iterative algorithm for constructing such Markov chains. A recent work describes how to efficiently solve the minimum cost Markov chain problem by first constructing a "Markov Chain Polytope" and then running the Ellipsoid algorithm for linear programming on it. This paper's second result is that, in the AIFV case, a special property of the polytope instead permits solving the corresponding linear program using simple binary search.
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