Likelihood-Based Data Squashing: A Modeling Approach to Instance Construction

Squashing is a lossy data compression technique that preserves statistical information. Specifically, squashing compresses a massive dataset to a much smaller one so that outputs from statistical analyses carried out on the smaller (squashed) dataset reproduce outputs from the same statistical analyses carried out on the original dataset. Likelihood-based data squashing (LDS) differs from a previously published squashing algorithm insofar as it uses a statistical model to squash the data. The results show that LDS provides excellent squashing performance even when the target statistical analysis departs from the model used to squash the data.