Arithmetic N-gram: an efficient data compression technique

Abstract

Due to the increase in the growth of data in this era of the digital world and limited resources, there is a need for more efficient data compression techniques for storing and transmitting data. Data compression can significantly reduce the amount of storage space and transmission time to store and transmit given data. More specifically, text compression has got more attention for effectively managing and processing data due to the increased use of the internet, digital devices, data transfer, etc. Over the years, various algorithms have been used for text compression such as Huffman coding, Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) coding, arithmetic coding, etc. However, these methods have a limited compression ratio specifically for data storage applications where a considerable amount of data must be compressed to use storage resources efficiently. They consider individual characters to compress data. It can be more advantageous to consider words or sequences of words rather than individual characters to get a better compression ratio. Compressing individual characters results in a sizeable compressed representation due to their less repetition and structure in the data. In this paper, we proposed the ArthNgram model, in which the N-gram language model coupled with arithmetic coding is used to compress data more efficiently for data storage applications. The performance of the proposed model is evaluated based on compression ratio and compression speed. Results show that the proposed model performs better than traditional techniques.