Lossless coding with generalized criteria

This paper presents prefix codes which minimize various criteria constructed as a convex combination of maximum codeword length and average codeword length, or, a convex combination of the average of an exponential function of the codeword length and the average codeword length. This framework encompasses as a special case several criteria previously investigated in the literature, while relations to universal coding is discussed. The coding algorithm derived is parametric resulting in re-adjusting the initial source probabilities via a weighted probability vector according to a merging rule. An algorithm is presented to compute the weighting vector.