---
title: Tales of Huffman
url: https://www.emergentmind.com/papers/0612133
type: paper
arxiv_id: '0612133'
arxiv_url: https://arxiv.org/abs/0612133
published: '2006-12-25'
categories:
- cs.IT
- cs.CC
- math.IT
---

# Tales of Huffman

## Abstract

We study the new problem of Huffman-like codes subject to individual restrictions on the code-word lengths of a subset of the source words. These are prefix codes with minimal expected code-word length for a random source where additionally the code-word lengths of a subset of the source words is prescribed, possibly differently for every such source word. Based on a structural analysis of properties of optimal solutions, we construct an efficient dynamic programming algorithm for this problem, and for an integer programming problem that may be of independent interest.