Laplace's law of succession and universal encoding
R.E. Krichevskiy · IEEE Transactions on Information Theory · 1998
This correspondence shows that the known "add-half" rule is not asymptotically optimal for predicting the (n+1)st symbol after a sequence of n symbols, whereas the "add-/spl beta//sub 0/" rule, /spl beta//sub 0/=0.50922/spl middot//spl middot//spl middot/is.