Alphabetic coding with exponential costs
This note considers an alphabetic binary tree formulation in a family of nonlinear problems. An application of this family occurs when a random outcome needs to be determined via alphabetically ordered search within a stochastic time window. Rather than finding a decision tree minimizing ∑ i = 1 n w...
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          | Published in | Information processing letters Vol. 110; no. 4; pp. 139 - 142 | 
|---|---|
| Main Author | |
| Format | Journal Article | 
| Language | English | 
| Published | 
        Amsterdam
          Elsevier B.V
    
        16.01.2010
     Elsevier Elsevier Sequoia S.A  | 
| Subjects | |
| Online Access | Get full text | 
| ISSN | 0020-0190 1872-6119  | 
| DOI | 10.1016/j.ipl.2009.11.008 | 
Cover
| Summary: | This note considers an alphabetic binary tree formulation in a family of nonlinear problems. An application of this family occurs when a random outcome needs to be determined via alphabetically ordered search within a stochastic time window. Rather than finding a decision tree minimizing
∑
i
=
1
n
w
(
i
)
l
(
i
)
, this variant involves minimizing
log
a
∑
i
=
1
n
w
(
i
)
a
l
(
i
)
for a given
a
∈
(
0
,
1
)
. Herein a dynamic programming algorithm finds the optimal solution in
O
(
n
3
)
time and
O
(
n
2
)
space; methods traditionally used to improve the speed of optimizations in related problems, such as the Hu–Tucker procedure, fail for this problem. This note thus also introduces two algorithms which can find a suboptimal solution in linear time (for one) or
O
(
n
log
n
)
time (for the other), with associated redundancy bounds guaranteeing their coding efficiency. | 
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| Bibliography: | SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-1 content type line 14 ObjectType-Article-2 content type line 23  | 
| ISSN: | 0020-0190 1872-6119  | 
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.ipl.2009.11.008 |