Dual Domain Expurgated Error Exponents for Source Coding with Side Information

We introduce an expurgation method for source coding with side information that enables direct dual-domain derivations of expurgated error exponents. Dual-domain methods yield optimization problems over few parameters, with any sub-optimal choice resulting in an achievable exponent, as opposed to primal-domain optimization over distributions. In addition, dual-domain methods naturally allow for general alphabets and/or memory. We derive two such expurgated error exponents for different random-coding ensembles. We show the better of the exponents coincides with the Csiszár-Körner exponent obtained via a graph decomposition lemma. We show some numerical examples that illustrate the differences between the two exponents and show that in the case of source coding without side information, the expurgated exponent coincides with the error exponent of the source optimal code.