English

A Property of the Kullback--Leibler Divergence for Location-scale Models

Statistics Theory 2016-04-08 v1 Methodology Statistics Theory

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss a property of the Kullback--Leibler divergence measured between two models of the family of the location-scale distributions. We show that, if model M1M_1 and model M2M_2 are represented by location-scale distributions, then the minimum Kullback--Leibler divergence from M1M_1 to M2M_2, with respect to the parameters of M2M_2, is independent from the value of the parameters of M1M_1. Furthermore, we show that the property holds for models that can be transformed into location-scale distributions. We illustrate a possible application of the property in objective Bayesian model selection.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1604.01983,
  title  = {A Property of the Kullback--Leibler Divergence for Location-scale Models},
  author = {Cristiano Villa},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1604.01983},
  year   = {2016}
}