Minimax universal noiseless coding for unifilar and Markov sources (Corresp.)

Constructive upper bounds are presented for minimax universal noiseless coding of unifilar sources without any ergodicity assumptionS. These bounds are obtained by quantizing the estimated probability distribution of source letters with respect to the relative entropy. They apply both to fixed-length to variable-length (FV) and variable-length to fixed-length (VF) codes. Unifilar sources are a generalization of the usual definition of Markov sources, so these results apply to Markov sources as well. These upper bounds agree asymptotically with the lower bounds given by Davisson for FV coding of stationary ergodic Markov sources.