An unrolled decision feedback equalizer (DFE) as disclosed herein has a reduced number of compensation factors while keeping a suitable performance level for a given application. The KN possible DFE correction levels are reduced or compressed into fewer levels (R), merging together the levels that are the closest together where K represents the number of possible symbols in each baud, or the number of bits encoded into each baud, and N represents the DFE depth in number of bauds. A mapping function is then provided to convert the KN combinations of previous history bits into R sampler selections.