Mathematics of information and coding. Transl. from the Japanese by Joe Suzuki (Q2762929)

This volume is a very nice introduction to information theory and to source coding. According to the preface of this edition, the emphasis is put on source coding because it is ``more basic'' than channel coding and because of recent advances where the universality (coding and decoding asymptotic optimal compression ratio independent of the source statistics) aspect of source coding is prominent. In this way the volume goes beyond an introduction.NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEThe first chapters present basic notions (entropy, mutual information, basic codes for sources). Chapter four treats arithmetic codes. The next three chapters are devoted to universal codes of integers, texts and compound sources respectively. Finally aspects of data analysis involving the minimum description length principle in such a way that the minimum codeword length is associated to a structure which has to be identified adaptively through learning are displayed. Here it is seen how information theory makes connections with traditionally separate domains of statistics.NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEThere are plenty of exercises, references grouped according to the chapters and an index.NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEThis book can be strongly recommended for teaching and learning information theory.