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An Entropy-Energy Identity for Predictive Kullback-Leibler Regret in Infinitely Divisible Location Models

Statistics Theory 2026-05-27 v1 Probability Statistics Theory

Abstract

We consider predictive density estimation under logarithmic score for dd-dimensional infinitely divisible location models. Taking the formal Bayes predictive density under the Lebesgue prior as a benchmark, we study the Kullback-Leibler regret of competing Bayes predictive densities. Our main contribution is an exact entropy-energy identity: the integrated regret of a Bayes predictive density p^π\hat{p}^{\pi} under prior π\pi relative to the benchmark admits an exact representation as the Dirichlet-form energy of the square-rooted marginal distribution Mπ\sqrt{M^{\pi}} for the symmetric Markov semigroup induced by the benchmark kernel. This converts regret comparisons into a potential-theoretic problem and yields a sharp recurrence/transience characterization of when the benchmark predictive density can or cannot be uniformly improved. We introduce an A\mathcal{A}-harmonic class of improper priors -- defined through the generator A\mathcal{A} of the induced process -- and give explicit tail conditions -- an integral test on the induced marginal, equivalent to power-law prior decay in heavy-tailed models -- that guarantee admissibility of the resulting Bayes predictive density. We illustrate the theory with new results for several distributions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.27253,
  title  = {An Entropy-Energy Identity for Predictive Kullback-Leibler Regret in Infinitely Divisible Location Models},
  author = {Kōsaku Takanashi and Kenichiro McAlinn},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.27253},
  year   = {2026}
}