There are two types of compression: lossless and lossy. Lossy compression achieves a greater reduction in file sizes by carefully discarding data that doesn't greatly affect the results. JPEG and MP3 ...

Lossless or lossy: If you have big data, know what type of compression to use Your email has been sent Illustration: Lisa Hornung/iStockPhoto Must-read big data coverage What Powers Your Databases?

Most people have downloaded large files, such as music or video, from the Internet. Because of the large size of these files, downloading them can take hours. To solve this problem, and make better ...

Compression algorithms for speech, audio, still images, and video are quite complicated and, more importantly, nearly always lossy. Thus, samples often change dramatically once they’re decompressed.