Probability table compression using distributional clustering for scanning n-tuple classifiers

A method for compressing tables of probability distributions using distributional clustering is presented and applied to shrink the look-up tables of a scanning n-tuple handwritten character recognizer. Lossy compression is realized by clustering n-tuples that are observed to induce similar class probability distributions. A new distance metric called "weighted mean KL divergence" is introduced to assess similarity and account for the cumulative effect of merging two distributions. After compression, cluster membership is rebalanced in an annealing-like process. The proposed method is evaluated on three isolated-character subsets of the UNIPEN database. Compression ratios in excess of 2000:1 are demonstrated for 5-tuple classifiers.