English

Nonextensive Generalizations of the Jensen-Shannon Divergence

Information Theory 2008-04-11 v1 math.IT Statistics Theory Statistics Theory

Abstract

Convexity is a key concept in information theory, namely via the many implications of Jensen's inequality, such as the non-negativity of the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD). Jensen's inequality also underlies the concept of Jensen-Shannon divergence (JSD), which is a symmetrized and smoothed version of the KLD. This paper introduces new JSD-type divergences, by extending its two building blocks: convexity and Shannon's entropy. In particular, a new concept of q-convexity is introduced and shown to satisfy a Jensen's q-inequality. Based on this Jensen's q-inequality, the Jensen-Tsallis q-difference is built, which is a nonextensive generalization of the JSD, based on Tsallis entropies. Finally, the Jensen-Tsallis q-difference is charaterized in terms of convexity and extrema.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0804.1653,
  title  = {Nonextensive Generalizations of the Jensen-Shannon Divergence},
  author = {Andre Martins and Pedro Aguiar and Mario Figueiredo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0804.1653},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:29:32.668Z