Malleable coding with edit-distance cost

A malleable coding scheme considers not only representation length but also ease of representation update, thereby encouraging some form of recycling to convert an old codeword into a new one. We examine the trade-off between compression efficiency and malleability cost, measured with a string edit distance that introduces a metric topology to the representation domain. We characterize the achievable rates and malleability as the solution of a subgraph isomorphism problem.