On Universal D-Semifaithful Coding for Memoryless Sources with Infinite Alphabets

TL;DR

This paper investigates the limits of universal D-semifaithful source coding for stationary memoryless sources on countably infinite alphabets, establishing conditions for universality and demonstrating its impossibility for the entire family.

Contribution

It provides sufficient conditions for universal D-semifaithful coding, characterizes when it is impossible, and relates these conditions to known results in lossless universal source coding.

Findings

Universal D-semifaithful coding is not feasible for all stationary memoryless sources on infinite alphabets.

Sufficient conditions for weak and strong minimax universality are established.

A matching impossibility condition is identified, paralleling lossless coding results.

Abstract

The problem of variable length and fixed-distortion universal source coding (or D-semifaithful source coding) for stationary and memoryless sources on countably infinite alphabets ($\infty$-alphabets) is addressed in this paper. The main results of this work offer a set of sufficient conditions (from weaker to stronger) to obtain weak minimax universality, strong minimax universality, and corresponding achievable rates of convergences for the worse-case redundancy for the family of stationary memoryless sources whose densities are dominated by an envelope function (or the envelope family) on $\infty$-alphabets. An important implication of these results is that universal D-semifaithful source coding is not feasible for the complete family of stationary and memoryless sources on $\infty$-alphabets. To demonstrate this infeasibility, a sufficient condition for the impossibility is presented for the envelope family. Interestingly, it matches the well-known impossibility condition in the context of lossless (variable-length) universal source coding. More generally, this work offers a simple description of what is needed to achieve universal D-semifaithful coding for a family of distributions $\Lambda$. This reduces to finding a collection of quantizations of the product space at different block-lengths -- reflecting the fixed distortion restriction -- that satisfy two asymptotic requirements: the first is a universal quantization condition with respect to $\Lambda$, and the second is a vanishing information radius (I-radius) condition for $\Lambda$ reminiscent of the condition known for lossless universal source coding.