Tight Bounds on Minimum Maximum Pointwise Redundancy

Abstract: This paper presents new lower and upper bounds for the optimal compression of binary prefix codes in terms of the most probable input symbol, where compression efficiency is determined by the nonlinear codeword length objective of minimizing maximum pointwise redundancy. This objective relates to both universal modeling and Shannon coding, and these bounds are tight throughout the interval. The upper bounds also apply to a related objective, that of dth exponential redundancy.