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Interpretive Efficiency: Information-Geometric Foundations of Data Usefulness

Machine Learning 2025-12-09 v1 Information Retrieval Information Theory math.IT

Abstract

Interpretability is central to trustworthy machine learning, yet existing metrics rarely quantify how effectively data support an interpretive representation. We propose Interpretive Efficiency, a normalized, task-aware functional that measures the fraction of task-relevant information transmitted through an interpretive channel. The definition is grounded in five axioms ensuring boundedness, Blackwell-style monotonicity, data-processing stability, admissible invariance, and asymptotic consistency. We relate the functional to mutual information and derive a local Fisher-geometric expansion, then establish asymptotic and finite-sample estimation guarantees using standard empirical-process tools. Experiments on controlled image and signal tasks demonstrate that the measure recovers theoretical orderings, exposes representational redundancy masked by accuracy, and correlates with robustness, making it a practical, theory-backed diagnostic for representation design.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.06341,
  title  = {Interpretive Efficiency: Information-Geometric Foundations of Data Usefulness},
  author = {Ronald Katende},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.06341},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:12:50.994Z