A Unified Framework for Problems on Guessing, Source Coding and Task Partitioning

Abstract: We study four problems namely, Campbell's source coding problem, Arikan's guessing problem, Huieihel et al.'s memoryless guessing problem, and Bunte and Lapidoth's task partitioning problem. We observe a close relationship among these problems. In all these problems, the objective is to minimize moments of some functions of random variables, and R\'enyi entropy and Sundaresan's divergence arise as optimal solutions. This motivates us to establish a connection among these four problems. In this paper, we study a more general problem and show that R\'{e}nyi and Shannon entropies arise as its solution. We show that the problems on source coding, guessing and task partitioning are particular instances of this general optimization problem, and derive the lower bounds using this framework. We also refine some known results and present new results for mismatched version of these problems using a unified approach. We strongly feel that this generalization would, in addition to help in understanding the similarities and distinctiveness of these problems, also help to solve any new problem that falls in this framework.