Dynamic Programming for Discrete Memoryless Channel Quantization

In this paper, we present a general framework for applying dynamic programming (DP) to discrete memoryless channel (DMC) quantization. The DP has complexity $O(q (N-M)^2 M)$, where $q$, $N$, and $M$ are alphabet sizes of the DMC input, DMC output, and the quantizer output, respectively. Then, starting from the quadrangle inequality (QI), we apply two techniques to reduce the DP's complexity. One technique makes use of the SMAWK algorithm with complexity $O(q (N-M) M)$, while the other technique is much easier to be implemented and has complexity $O(q (N^2 - M^2))$. Next, we give a sufficient condition on the channel transition probability, under which the two low-complexity techniques can be applied for designing quantizers that maximize the $\alpha$-mutual information, which is a generalized objective function for channel quantization. This condition works for the general $q$-ary input case, including the previous work for $q = 2$ as a subcase. Moreover, we propose a new idea, called iterative DP (IDP). Theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that IDP can improve the quantizer design over the state-of-the-art methods in the literature.