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