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In computer science and information theory, a Huffman code is a particular type of optimal prefix code that is commonly used for lossless data compression.The process of finding or using such a code is Huffman coding, an algorithm developed by David A. Huffman while he was a Sc.D. student at MIT, and published in the 1952 paper "A Method for the Construction of Minimum-Redundancy Codes".
The package-merge algorithm is an O(nL)-time algorithm for finding an optimal length-limited Huffman code for a given distribution on a given alphabet of size n, where no code word is longer than L. It is a greedy algorithm , and a generalization of Huffman's original algorithm .
In order for a symbol code scheme such as the Huffman code to be decompressed, the same model that the encoding algorithm used to compress the source data must be provided to the decoding algorithm so that it can use it to decompress the encoded data. In standard Huffman coding this model takes the form of a tree of variable-length codes, with ...
Huffman coding is a more sophisticated technique for constructing variable-length prefix codes. The Huffman coding algorithm takes as input the frequencies that the code words should have, and constructs a prefix code that minimizes the weighted average of the code word lengths. (This is closely related to minimizing the entropy.)
A greedy algorithm is used to construct a Huffman tree during Huffman coding where it finds an optimal solution. In decision tree learning, greedy algorithms are commonly used, however they are not guaranteed to find the optimal solution. One popular such algorithm is the ID3 algorithm for decision tree construction.
Adaptive Huffman coding (also called Dynamic Huffman coding) is an adaptive coding technique based on Huffman coding. It permits building the code as the symbols are being transmitted, having no initial knowledge of source distribution, that allows one-pass encoding and adaptation to changing conditions in data.
Some dichotomic searches only have results at the leaves of the tree, such as the Huffman tree used in Huffman coding, or the implicit classification tree used in Twenty Questions. Other dichotomic searches also have results in at least some internal nodes of the tree, such as a dichotomic search table for Morse code. There is thus some ...
Huffman coding and arithmetic coding (when they can be used) give at least as good, and often better compression than any universal code.. However, universal codes are useful when Huffman coding cannot be used — for example, when one does not know the exact probability of each message, but only knows the rankings of their probabilities.