What type of compression does Huffman coding represent?

Huffman coding is a method of lossless compression, which means it compresses data without losing any information. This technique works by assigning variable-length codes to input characters, with shorter codes assigned to more frequently occurring characters and longer codes to less frequent ones. This allows the encoding of data in a way that maintains perfect fidelity to the original data, enabling the exact reconstruction of the initial information upon decompression.

The other types of compression listed are not applicable to Huffman coding. Lossy compression involves some loss of data and is typically used in scenarios where a perfect reproduction is not necessary, such as audio or image files. Real-time compression relates to processes that need to occur instantly or with minimal latency, which is not the primary purpose of Huffman coding. Predictive compression involves making predictions about data sequences to reduce size, rather than using frequency-based encoding like Huffman's approach. Therefore, the accurate classification of Huffman coding is as a lossless compression technique.