Outage concept extended to source coding for non-ergodic data sources
Distortion-Rate Outage Probability for Non-ergodic Classes of Sources
Information Theory
Summary
Sometimes the data sources we want to compress or represent don’t behave the same way over time, which makes it hard to guarantee how well the compression will work. The authors introduce a way to think about "outage"—a situation where the compression might fail to meet a target quality—when the source data is not steady or predictable. They explore this idea specifically for certain types of source data classes and show examples to illustrate how it works.
What this means in practice
- •For data compression engineers: Evaluate compression schemes for data types with unpredictable statistics to assess quality failure probabilities during encoding.
- •For communication system designers: Use the outage framework to better understand performance limits when transmitting non-stationary or changing data sources over channels.
A theory result. No direct application yet.
Authors
Dongmin Park, Ibrahim Abou-Faycal, Razane Tajeddine
Abstract
The concept of outage has been commonly used in the context of transmission rates over non-ergodic channels. For those channels, one channel state or realization may be encountered for the whole transmission duration of a codeword. In the dual setting of source coding and whenever source statistics are not ergodic, we define in this work the notion of outage; we discuss related properties, consider the special case of compact source classes and provide examples.