Blahut-Arimoto Rate-Distortion Algorithm

Identity Notes & Concept Scope This record is the rate-distortion branch: the source distribution is fixed and the reproduction channel is optimized. The channel-capacity branch instead fixes the channel and maximizes information over its input law; it is not an alias here. The IM algorithm maximizes a variational information bound, while this procedure minimizes information plus a distortion penalty. Exemplar clustering, information-bottleneck methods and learning-target selection may embed related updates but require their own objectives and constraints. No normalized identity collision across all 442 pinned AIO IDs, labels/scoped synonyms and 483 maintained IDs, names and aliases. Full-checkout searches in the worktree and main included ignored and hidden files: 8 and 9 matched lines, respectively, reduce to six distinct matched texts, all inspected. Hits concern existing discovery leads and the unrelated assembler mnemonic AAM. The fixed-family exact KL projection procedure is narrower than generalized alternating minimization; weight-only EM fixes component laws rather than fitting a full mixture model; rate-distortion BA minimizes information plus distortion with a fixed source, whereas the IM algorithm maximizes a variational information bound; adaptive alternating minimization changes the feasible families at each iteration. Qualified AAM and descriptive weight-only names avoid unsupported acronym or historical naming claims. Absence is bounded to this snapshot and inspected corpus. Identity-search counts: 8 worktree and 9 main matched lines, all six distinct texts read, including ignored and hidden files.