English

The length of a typical Huffman codeword

adap-org 2008-02-03 v1 Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems

Abstract

If p is the probability of a letter of a memoryless source, the length l of the corresponding binary Huffman codeword can be very different from the value -log p. We show that, nevertheless, for a typical letter, l is approximately equal to -log p. More precisely, the probability that l differs from -log p by more than m decreases exponentially with m.

Cite

@article{arxiv.adap-org/9303001,
  title  = {The length of a typical Huffman codeword},
  author = {R. Schack},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:adap-org/9303001},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

4 pages, LATEX

R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:40:27.316Z