A new model of numerical computer data and its application for construction of minimum-redundancy codes

Numerical computer data in many applications contain numerous leading and trailing zeros, and this data feature has been neglected in common source models and related data compression methods. A new approach to source modeling, consisting of the description of this data feature by probabilities p_ij of data values with i leading and j trailing zeros, is proposed. The entropy of this source model is proved to be less than the entropy of the common ones. Based on this model a few codes of different computational complexity are proposed. Experiments on typical computer files show that the coding algorithms based on the new source and data model considerably outperform existing data compression algorithms