Non-asymptotic quantisation of spherically symmetric distributions
Authors: Luc Pronzato, Anatoly Zhigljavsky
Summary
arXiv:2605. 12568v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Zador's celebrated theorem is a cornerstone of optimal quantisation, establishing both the weak limit of the empirical distribution of an $n$-point optimal quantiser in $R^d$ and the decay rate of the associated $L_s$-mean quantisation error.
Relevance
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Abstract
arXiv:2605.12568v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Zador's celebrated theorem is a cornerstone of optimal quantisation, establishing both the weak limit of the empirical distribution of an $n$-point optimal quantiser in $R^d$ and the decay rate of the associated $L_s$-mean quantisation error. However, for large dimensions $d$, observing this asymptotic behaviour demands an astronomically large sample size $n$, which grows super-exponentially with $d$. Through a detailed analysis of the quantisation problem for spherically symmetric distributions, we demonstrate that for moderate $n$ random quantisers uniformly distributed on a sphere of suitable radius $r$ achieve exceptional performance. The expected distortion, expressed as a triple integral, can be computed with arbitrary precision, and the optimal radius $r$ can be efficiently determined numerically. Leveraging results from extreme-value theory, we derive approximations for $r$, particularly in scenarios where $n$ scales with $d$. Depending on the growth rate of $n$, $r$ may either converge to zero or approach a limiting value that is independent of $s$.