A generic top-down dynamic-programming approach to prefix-free coding

Authors:
Mordecai Golin;Xiaoming Xu;Jiajin Yu
Affiliations:
Hong Kong UST, Hong Kong, China;Fudan University, Shanghai, China;Fudan University, Shanghai, China
Venue:
SODA '09 Proceedings of the twentieth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms
Year:
2009

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Abstract

Given a probability distribution over a set of n words to be transmitted, the Huffman Coding problem is to find a minimal-cost prefix free code for transmitting those words. The basic Huffman coding problem can be solved in O(n log n) time but variations are more difficult. One of the standard techniques for solving these variations utilizes a top-down dynamic programming approach. In this paper we show that this approach is amenable to dynamic programming speedup techniques, permitting a speedup of an order of magnitude for many algorithms in the literature for such variations as mixed radix, reserved length and one-ended coding. These speedups are immediate implications of a general structural property that permits batching together the calculation of many DP entries.