Efficient universal lossless data compression algorithms based on a greedy sequential grammar transform. I. Without context models

A grammar transform is a transformation that converts any data sequence to be compressed into a grammar from which the original data sequence can be fully reconstructed. In a grammar-based code, a data sequence is first converted into a grammar by a grammar transform and then losslessly encoded. In this paper, a greedy grammar transform is first presented; this grammar transform constructs sequentially a sequence of irreducible grammars from which the original data sequence can be recovered incrementally. Based on this grammar transform, three universal lossless data compression algorithms, a sequential algorithm, an improved sequential algorithm, and a hierarchical algorithm, are then developed. These algorithms combine the power of arithmetic coding with that of string matching. It is shown that these algorithms are all universal in the sense that they can achieve asymptotically the entropy rate of any stationary, ergodic source. Moreover, it is proved that their worst case redundancies among all individual sequences of length n are upper-bounded by c log log n/log n, where c is a constant. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms outperform the Unix Compress and Gzip algorithms, which are based on LZ78 and LZ77, respectively.