English

A Lower Bound on the Complexity of Approximating the Entropy of a Markov Source

Information Theory 2009-12-31 v1 math.IT

Abstract

Suppose that, for any (k \geq 1), (\epsilon > 0) and sufficiently large σ\sigma, we are given a black box that allows us to sample characters from a kkth-order Markov source over the alphabet (\{0, ..., \sigma - 1\}). Even if we know the source has entropy either 0 or at least (\log (\sigma - k)), there is still no algorithm that, with probability bounded away from (1 / 2), guesses the entropy correctly after sampling at most ((\sigma - k)^{k / 2 - \epsilon}) characters.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0912.5079,
  title  = {A Lower Bound on the Complexity of Approximating the Entropy of a Markov Source},
  author = {Travis Gagie},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0912.5079},
  year   = {2009}
}