Inducing codes from examples

A data compression algorithm is proposed which automatically analyzes a collection of examples to identify the set of strings which would be most useful to encode them. There is considerable subtlety in identifying the most useful strings, since the problem is NP-complete, but analysis and encoding/decoding heuristics have been developed which construct excellent codes. This paper describes the algorithm and experimental results on four different special domains: mailing addresses, FORTRAN programs, weather radar images and UNIX manual pages.<
>