English

Better Algorithms for Constructing Minimum Cost Markov Chains and AIFV Codes

Data Structures and Algorithms 2024-07-08 v1

Abstract

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 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

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2405.06831,
  title  = {Better Algorithms for Constructing Minimum Cost Markov Chains and AIFV Codes},
  author = {Reza Hosseini Dolatabadi and Mordedcai J. Golin and Arian Zamani},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.06831},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Expanded version of paper appearing in ISIT 2024. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2401.11622

R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:23:50.882Z