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Average entropy of Gaussian mixtures

Information Theory 2025-02-12 v2 math.IT

Abstract

We calculate the average differential entropy of a qq-component Gaussian mixture in Rn\mathbb R^n. For simplicity, all components have covariance matrix σ21\sigma^2 {\mathbf 1}, while the means {Wi}i=1q\{\mathbf{W}_i\}_{i=1}^{q} are i.i.d. Gaussian vectors with zero mean and covariance s21s^2 {\mathbf 1}. We obtain a series expansion in μ=s2/σ2\mu=s^2/\sigma^2 for the average differential entropy up to order O(μ2)\mathcal{O}(\mu^2), and we provide a recipe to calculate higher order terms. Our result provides an analytic approximation with a quantifiable order of magnitude for the error, which is not achieved in previous literature.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2404.07311,
  title  = {Average entropy of Gaussian mixtures},
  author = {Basheer Joudeh and Boris Škorić},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.07311},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

24 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T15:50:27.618Z