A two-step sequential approach for hyperparameter selection in finite context models

ArXi:2603.19736v1 Announce Type: cross Finite-context models (FCMs) are widely used for compressing symbolic sequences such as DNA, where predictive performance depends critically on the context length k and smoothing parameter {\alpha}. In practice, these hyperparameters are typically selected through exhaustive search, which is computationally expensive and scales poorly with model complexity. This paper proposes a statistically grounded two-step sequential approach for efficient hyperparameter selection in FCMs.