cs.FLSep 17, 2026

Stringological sequence prediction III: layered ziplines and a tradeoff between efficiency and expressivity

Authors: Vanessa Kosoy

Organizations: Faculty of Mathematics, Technion, Haifa, Israel · Computational Rational Agents Laboratory, Delaware, USA

Abstract

In previous papers, we began the study of sequence prediction algorithms adapted to stringological word complexity measures. In particular, we defined a complexity measure called Arithmetic Repetition Complexity (ARC) which admits a polynomial-time prediction algorithm with a mistake bound quasilinear in the complexity. Here, we show a weaker complexity measure related to ARC that admits an especially efficient prediction algorithm: an algorithm that runs in quasilinear time and polylog space for appropriate highly-structured sequences. The complexity measure is defined via a restricted class of "zipline programs" (a variant of straight-line programs), which we call layered. We thus get a less expressive measure with a more efficient algorithm (compared to our results for ARC), demonstrating a possible tradeoff.

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