reorders the bytes in a way that makes the MTF transform more effective. One problem with the basic MTF transform is that it makes the same changes for any character, regardless of frequency, which can result in diminished compression as characters that occur rarely may push frequent characters to higher values. Various alterations and alternatives have been developed for this reason. One common change is to make it so that characters above a certain point can only be moved to a certain threshold. Another is to make some algorithm that runs a count of each character's local frequency and uses these values to choose the characters' order at any point. Many of these transforms still reserve zero for repeat characters, since these are often the most common in data after the Burrows Wheeler Transform. Move-to-front linked-list The term Move To Front (MTF) is also used in a slightly different context, as a type of a dynamic linked list. In an MTF list, each element is moved to the front when it is accessed. This ensures that, over time, the more frequently accessed elements are easier to access. References External links "Move to front" by Arturo San Emeterio Campos Data compression Lossless compression algorithms Transforms Articles with example Python (programming language) code