We raise the question of approximating compressibility of a string with respect to a fixed compression scheme, in sublinear time. We study this question in detail for two popular lossless compression schemes: run-length encoding (RLE) and Lempel-Ziv (LZ), and present algorithms and lower bounds for approximating compressibility with respect to ... more >>>

The advent of data science has spurred interest in estimating properties of discrete distributions over large alphabets. Fundamental symmetric properties such as support size, support coverage, entropy, and proximity to uniformity, received most attention, with each property estimated using a different technique and often intricate analysis tools.

Motivated by the ... more >>>