Data Compression

The source model discussed throughout this chapter is the Discrete Source (DS). Such a source is a pair $$(\mathcal{X},P)$$ , where $$\mathcal{X}\triangleq \{1,\dots ,a\}$$ , say, is a finite alphabet and $$P\triangleq (P(1),\dots ,P(a))$$ is a probability distribution on $$\mathcal{X}$$ . A discrete source can also be described by a random variable $$X:\mathcal{X}\rightarrow \mathcal{X}$$ , where $$\text {Prob}(X=x)=P(x)$$ for all $$x\in \mathcal{X}$$ .