English

Minimum relative entropy distributions with a large mean are Gaussian

Statistical Mechanics 2016-12-06 v1 Probability Statistics Theory Populations and Evolution Statistics Theory

Abstract

We consider the following frustrated optimization problem: given a prior probability distribution qq, find the distribution pp minimizing the relative entropy with respect to qq such that mean(p)\textrm{mean}(p) is fixed and large. We show that solutions to this problem are asymptotically Gaussian. As an application we derive an HH-type theorem for evolutionary dynamics: the entropy of the (standardized) distribution of fitness of a population evolving under natural selection is eventually increasing.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1605.08259,
  title  = {Minimum relative entropy distributions with a large mean are Gaussian},
  author = {Matteo Smerlak},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.08259},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

5 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T14:10:12.414Z