Limitations of Huffman coding
Changing ensemble
- What if the ensemble probabilities change with time, or if we don’t know the probabilities a priori?
The extra bit
- If H(X) is large, then the effect of the +1 is small
- What if H(X) < 1 bit? Such as in text compression
- Huffman coding uses at least one bit per character
- Encoding blocks of text has its own problems
Research area is a part of coding theory