It has long been known that the compression redundancy of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) strings increases to infinity as the alphabet size grows. It is also apparent that any string can be described by separately conveying its symbols, and its pattern—the order in which the symbols appear. Concentrating on the latter, we show that the patterns of i.i.d. strings over all, including infinite and even unknown, alphabets, can be compressed with diminishing redundancy, both in block and sequentially, and that the compression can be performed in linear time. To establish these results, we show that the number of patterns is the Bell number, that the number of patterns with a given number of symbols is the Stirling number of the second kind, and that the redundancy of patterns can be bounded using results of Hardy and Ramanujan on the number of integer partitions. The results also imply an asymptotically optimal solution for the Good-Turing probability-estimation problem.

Many applications call for universal compression of strings over large, possibly infinite, alphabets. However, it has long been known that the resulting redundancy is infinite even for i.i.d. distributions. It was recently shown that the redudancy of the strings ’ patterns, which abstract the values of the symbols, retaining only their relative precedence, is sublinear in the blocklength n, hence the per-symbol redundancy diminishes to zero. In this paper we show that pattern redundancy is at least (1.5 log 2 e) n 1/3 bits. To do so, we construct a generating function whose coefficients lower bound the redundancy, and use Hayman’s saddle-point approximation technique to determine the coefficients ’ asymptotic behavior. 1

Abstract — Recent work has considered encoding a string by separately conveying its symbols and its pattern—the order in which the symbols appear. It was shown that the patterns of i.i.d. strings can be losslessly compressed with diminishing per-symbol redundancy. In this paper the pattern redundancy of distributions with memory is considered. Close lower and upper bounds are established on the pattern redundancy of strings generated by Hidden Markov Models with a small number of states, showing in particular that their per-symbol pattern redundancy diminishes with increasing string length. The upper bounds are obtained by analyzing the growth rate of the number of multi-dimensional integer partitions, and the lower bounds, using Hayman’s Theorem. Index Terms — Hidden Markov Models, integer partitions, large alphabets, multi-dimensional partitions, patterns,

We analyze smoothing algorithms from a universal-compression perspective. Instead of evaluating their performance on an empirical sample, we analyze their performance on the most inconvenient sample possible. Consequently the performance of the algorithm can be guaranteed even on unseen data. We show that universal compression bounds can explain the empirical performance of several smoothing methods. We also describe a new interpolated additive smoothing algorithm, and show that it has lower training complexity and better compression performance than existing smoothing techniques. Key words: Language modeling, universal compression, smoothing 1