"Lossless" vs. "Lossy" Compression

Lossless -

Direct substitution encoding of original data

Based on information theory (e.g., Shannon's entropy)

Dictionary based encodings - shorter encodings for more frequent patterns

Ziv and Lempel

LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch)

Run-length Encodings - single encodings for repeating patterns

Lossy -

Mathematically altered in some approximately reversible way

Tradeoff between distortion and compression

Aspects of data - space, time, and frequency

Transformation efficiency

Reversibility

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