Vector quantization and density estimation

The connection between compression and the estimation of probability distributions has long been known for the case of discrete alphabet sources and lossless coding. A universal lossless code which does a good job of compressing must implicitly also do a good job of modeling. In particular, with a collection of codebooks, one for each possible class or model, if codewords are chosen from among the ensemble of codebooks so as to minimize bit rate, then the codebook selected provides an implicit estimate of the underlying class. Less is known about the corresponding connections between lossy compression and continuous sources. We consider aspects of estimating conditional and unconditional densities in conjunction with Bayes-risk weighted vector quantization for joint compression and classification.