Data compression 101
One of my talks is about data compression. The slide deck contains interactive animations that aren’t very interesting without further explanation.
In the coming weeks, I will add a number of so-called #explanatorials to help you understand data compression step-by-step. Down with the magic!
Two important concepts in data compression are compression itself and transformations.
Compression
In short, data compression boils down to:
Reducing the amount of data while retaining information.
- Run-Length Encoding (RLE)
- Lempel–Ziv (LZ)
- Huffman
Transformations
To aid data compression, an operation can be performed on the data before compression. This means that the data undergoes a reversible transformation - usually without reducing the file size.
- Delta encoding
- XOR encoding
- Burrows–Wheeler (BWT)
- Move To Front (MTF)
