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Data collection is a critical step in statistical inference and data science, and the goal of statistical experimental design (ED) is to find the data collection setup that can provide most information for the inference. In this work we…

Computation · Statistics 2020-07-01 Ziqiao Ao , Jinglai Li

We derive the Kullback-Leibler divergence for the normal-gamma distribution and show that it is identical to the Bayesian complexity penalty for the univariate general linear model with conjugate priors. Based on this finding, we provide…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-11-07 Joram Soch , Carsten Allefeld

Modern machine learning approaches excel in static settings where a large amount of i.i.d. training data are available for a given task. In a dynamic environment, though, an intelligent agent needs to be able to transfer knowledge and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-13 Jonas Wildberger , Siyuan Guo , Arnab Bhattacharyya , Bernhard Schölkopf

We study the problem of closeness testing for continuous distributions and its implications for causal discovery. Specifically, we analyze the sample complexity of distinguishing whether two multidimensional continuous distributions are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Fateme Jamshidi , Sina Akbari , Negar Kiyavash

In a variety of applications it is important to extract information from a probability measure $\mu$ on an infinite dimensional space. Examples include the Bayesian approach to inverse problems and possibly conditioned) continuous time…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-06-02 Frank Pinski , Gideon Simpson , Andrew Stuart , Hendrik Weber

$\alpha$-posteriors and their variational approximations distort standard posterior inference by downweighting the likelihood and introducing variational approximation errors. We show that such distortions, if tuned appropriately, reduce…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-04-20 Marco Avella Medina , José Luis Montiel Olea , Cynthia Rush , Amilcar Velez

Estimating the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence between language models has many applications, e.g., reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), interpretability, and knowledge distillation. However, computing the exact KL…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Afra Amini , Tim Vieira , Ryan Cotterell

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is not a proper distance metric and does not satisfy the triangle inequality, posing theoretical challenges in certain practical applications. Existing work has demonstrated that KL divergence between…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-03 Shiji Xiao , Yufeng Zhang , Chubo Liu , Yan Ding , Keqin Li , Kenli Li

The problem of estimating the Kullback-Leibler divergence $D(P\|Q)$ between two unknown distributions $P$ and $Q$ is studied, under the assumption that the alphabet size $k$ of the distributions can scale to infinity. The estimation is…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-02-22 Yuheng Bu , Shaofeng Zou , Yingbin Liang , Venugopal V. Veeravalli

In this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss and mathematically prove that it is equivalent to the Decoupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL) Divergence loss that consists of 1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE)…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Jiequan Cui , Zhuotao Tian , Zhisheng Zhong , Xiaojuan Qi , Bei Yu , Hanwang Zhang

Deep nonlinear models pose a challenge for fitting parameters due to lack of knowledge of the hidden layer and the potentially non-affine relation of the initial and observed layers. In the present work we investigate the use of information…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-12-20 Jacob S. Hunter , Nathan O. Hodas

Estimating Kullback-Leibler divergence from identical and independently distributed samples is an important problem in various domains. One simple and effective estimator is based on the k nearest neighbor distances between these samples.…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-02-27 Puning Zhao , Lifeng Lai

The $\alpha$-divergences include the well-known Kullback-Leibler divergence, Hellinger distance and $\chi^2$-divergence. In this paper, we derive differential and integral relations between the $\alpha$-divergences that are generalizations…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Tomohiro Nishiyama

In this paper, we discuss a property of the Kullback--Leibler divergence measured between two models of the family of the location-scale distributions. We show that, if model $M_1$ and model $M_2$ are represented by location-scale…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-04-08 Cristiano Villa

We consider the problem of estimating probability density functions based on sample data, using a finite mixture of densities from some component class. To this end, we introduce the $h$-lifted Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence as a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-24 Mark Chiu Chong , Hien Duy Nguyen , TrungTin Nguyen

Universal hypothesis testing refers to the problem of deciding whether samples come from a nominal distribution or an unknown distribution that is different from the nominal distribution. Hoeffding's test, whose test statistic is equivalent…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2017-11-15 Pengfei Yang , Biao Chen

The problem of filtering information from large correlation matrices is of great importance in many applications. We have recently proposed the use of the Kullback-Leibler distance to measure the performance of filtering algorithms in…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2008-12-02 M. Tumminello , F. Lillo , R. N. Mantegna

The two most commonly used criteria for assessing causal model discovery with artificial data are edit-distance and Kullback-Leibler divergence, measured from the true model to the learned model. Both of these metrics maximally reward the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-12 Rodney T. O'Donnell , Kevin B. Korb , Lloyd Allison

We characterize Martin-L\"of randomness and Schnorr randomness in terms of the merging of opinions, along the lines of the Blackwell-Dubins Theorem. After setting up a general framework for defining notions of merging randomness, we focus…

Logic · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Simon M. Huttegger , Sean Walsh , Francesca Zaffora Blando

Message identification (M-I) divergence is an important measure of the information distance between probability distributions, similar to Kullback-Leibler (K-L) and Renyi divergence. In fact, M-I divergence with a variable parameter can…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-04-08 Rui She , Shanyun Liu , Pingyi Fan