This appendix is a short introduction to elementary and ``well known''
methods for compressing (coding) data. The goal of compression is to
find a compact representation of information, by throwing away
redundancy
.
To have the necessary basement, we start by looking at some basic information theory. Following that is a description of statistical coding and dictionary based coding, two main categories for data compression methods.
This short survey is meant as a rough introduction only. More thorough information is found in the documents referenced in the text.