Compression of data streams down to their information content
Abstract
According to Kolmogorov complexity, every finite binary string is compressible to a shortest code -- its information content -- from which it is effectively recoverable. We investigate the extent to which this holds for infinite binary sequences (streams). We devise a new coding method which uniformly codes every stream into an algorithmically random stream , in such a way that the first bits of are recoverable from the first bits of , where is any partial computable information content measure which is defined on all prefixes of , and where is the initial segment of of length . As a consequence, if is any computable upper bound on the initial segment prefix-free complexity of , then is computable from an algorithmically random with oracle-use at most . Alternatively (making no use of such a computable bound ) one can achieve an oracle-use bounded above by . This provides a strong analogue of Shannon's source coding theorem for algorithmic information theory.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1710.02092,
title = {Compression of data streams down to their information content},
author = {George Barmpalias and Andrew Lewis-Pye},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.02092},
year = {2019}
}