Similarity and denoising

Abstract

We can discover the effective similarity among pairs of finite objects and denoise a finite object using the Kolmogorov complexity of these objects. The drawback is that the Kolmogorov complexity is not computable. If we approximate it, using a good realworld compressor, then it turns out that on natural data the processes give adequate results in practice. The methodology is parameter-free, alignment-free and works on individual data. We illustrate both methods with examples. © 2012 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.