English

Exact Expression For Information Distance

Information Theory 2019-08-29 v9 Computational Complexity Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Discrete Mathematics math.IT

Abstract

Information distance can be defined not only between two strings but also in a finite multiset of strings of cardinality greater than two. We give an elementary proof for expressing the information distance in terms of plain Kolmogorov complexity. It is exact since for each cardinality of the multiset the lower bound for some multiset equals the upper bound for all multisets up to a constant additive term.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1410.7328,
  title  = {Exact Expression For Information Distance},
  author = {P. M. B. Vitanyi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1410.7328},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

6 pages LaTeX. added material and corrected it

R2 v1 2026-06-22T06:37:31.304Z