The term Blahut–Arimoto algorithm is often used to refer to a class of algorithms for computing numerically either the information theoretic capacity of a channel, the rate-distortion function of a source or a source encoding (i.e. compression to remove the redundancy). They are iterative algorithms that eventually converge to one of the maxima of the optimization problem that is associated with these information theoretic concepts. The problem is , thus requiring a sufficient initialization to not get stuck in local maxima.