Huffman codes and self-information

  • Authors:
  • G. Katona;O. Nemetz

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

In this paper the connection between the self-information of a source letter from a finite alphabet and its code-word length in a Huffman code is investigated. Consider the set of all independent finite alphabet sources which contain a source letter a of probabilityp. The maximum over this set of the length of a Huffman codeword for a is determined. This maximum remains constant aspvaries between the reciprocal values of two consecutive Fibonacci numbers. For the smallpthis maximum is approximately equal toleft[ log_{2} frac{1+ sqrt{5}}{2} right]^{-1} approx 1.44times the self-information.