Coding and Compression: A Happy Union of Theory and Practice.

Journal of the American Statistical Association, September, 2000 by RISSANEN, Jorma; Yu, Bin

1. INTRODUCTION

The mathematical theory behind cooing aria compression began a little more than 50 years ago with the publication of Claude Shannon's (1948) "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in the Bell Systems Technical Journal. This article laid the foundation for what is now known as information theory in a mathematical framework that is probabilistic (see, e.g., Cover and Thomas 1991; Verdu 1998); that is, Shannon modeled the signal or message process by a random process and a communication channel by a random transition matrix that may distort the message. In ...