Zero suppression is the removal of redundant

Redundancy (information theory)

Redundancy in information theory is the number of bits used to transmit a message minus the number of bits of actual information in the message. Informally, it is the amount of wasted "space" used to transmit certain data...

 zeroes from a number. This can be done for storage, page or display space constraints or formatting reasons, such as making a letter

Letter (alphabet)

A letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters compose phonemes and each phoneme represents a phone in the spoken form of the language....

 more legible.

Examples:

• 00049823 → 49823
• 7.678600000 → 7.6786
• 0032.3231000 → 32.3231
• 2.45000×10¹⁰ → 2.45×10¹⁰
• 0.0045×10¹⁰ → 4.5×10⁷

One must be careful; in physics

Physics

Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

 and related disciplines, trailing zeros are used to indicate the precision of the number, as an error of ±1 in the last place is assumed. Examples:

• 4.5981 is 4.5981±0.0001
• 4.59810 is 4.5981±0.00001
• 4.598100 is 4.5981±0.000001

It is also a way to store a large array of numbers, where many of the entries are zero. By omitting the zeroes, and instead storing the indices along with the values of the non-zero items, less space may be used in total. It only makes sense if the extra space used for storing the indices (on average) is smaller than the space saved by not storing the zeroes. This is sometimes used in a sparse array

Sparse array

In computer science, a sparse array is an array in which most of the elements have the same value . The occurrence of zero elements in a large array is inconvenient for both computation and storage...

.

Example:

• Original array: 0, 1, 0, 0, 2, 5, 0, 0, 0, 4, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
• Pairs of index and data: {2,1}, {5,2}, {6,5}, {10,4}

Source

• Telecom Glossary 2000

See also

• Run-length encoding
  Run-length encoding
  Run-length encoding is a very simple form of data compression in which runs of data are stored as a single data value and count, rather than as the original run...
  
  
• Zero Code Suppression
• Zero suppressed decision diagram
  Zero suppressed decision diagram
  A zero-suppressed decision diagram is a version of binary decision diagram where instead of nodes being introduced when the positive and the negative part are different, they are introduced when negative part is different from constant 0...