longest huffman codeword

I'm not quite sure how to determine what the longest possible codeword is under Huffman encoding for a specific set of frequencies?

Any idea开发者_JS百科s?

For a specific set of frequencies? Generate your tree, then see how tall it is... If you're talking about in general, then it's something like N - 1.

Abu-Mostafa and McEliece provide an answer in terms of the probability of the least frequent symbol. The paper also has references to related work on similar questions.

http://tmo.jpl.nasa.gov/progress_report/42-110/110N.PDF