Subjective Distortion: Achievability and Outer Bounds for Distortion Functions with Memory

Abstract: In some rate-distortion-type problems, the required fidelity of information is affected by past actions. As a result, the distortion function depends not only on the instantaneous distortion between a source symbol and its representation symbol, but also on past representations. In this paper, we give a formal definition of this problem and introduce both inner (achievable) and outer bounds on the rate-distortion tradeoff. We also discuss convexification of the problem, which makes it easier to find bounds. Problems of this type arise in biological information processing, as well as in recommendation engines; we provide an example applied to a simplified biological information processing problem.