On Source Encoding with Side-information Under Ambiguous State of Nature

In this paper, we address the case of a single remote sensing unit (encoder), a central processing unit (decoder), and a finite bitrate constraint as an abstraction of a bandwidth-limited channel between the encoder and decoder. The goal is to spend this bit budget in an optimal sense, in terms of classification or estimation performance (minimize the probability of classification error or minimize the probability that the parameter estimation error exceeds a desired tolerance) while ensuring the reconstruction of the raw data with maximum fidelity (in a rate-distortion sense)