Variable-length compression allowing errors

This paper studies the fundamental limits of the minimum average length of lossless and lossy variable-length compression, allowing a nonzero error probability $ε$, for lossless compression. We give non-asymptotic bounds on the minimum average length in terms of Erokhin's rate-distortion function and we use those bounds to obtain a Gaussian approximation on the speed of approach to the limit which is quite accurate for all but small blocklengths: $(1 - ε) k H(\mathsf S) - \sqrt{\frac{k V(\mathsf S)}{2 π} } e^{- \frac {(Q^{-1}(ε))^2} 2 }$ where $Q^{-1}(\cdot)$ is the functional inverse of the standard Gaussian complementary cdf, and $V(\mathsf S)$ is the source dispersion. A nonzero error probability thus not only reduces the asymptotically achievable rate by a factor of $1 - ε$, but this asymptotic limit is approached from below, i.e. larger source dispersions and shorter blocklengths are beneficial. Variable-length lossy compression under an excess distortion constraint is shown to exhibit similar properties.

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