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Many recent methods for unsupervised or self-supervised representation learning train feature extractors by maximizing an estimate of the mutual information (MI) between different views of the data. This comes with several immediate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-24 Michael Tschannen , Josip Djolonga , Paul K. Rubenstein , Sylvain Gelly , Mario Lucic

Mutual information (MI) is a useful information-theoretic measure to quantify the statistical dependence between two random variables: $X$ and $Y$. Often, we are interested in understanding how the dependence between $X$ and $Y$ in one set…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Chetan Gohil , Oliver M Cliff , James M. Shine , Ben D. Fulcher , Joseph T. Lizier

Sliced mutual information (SMI) is defined as an average of mutual information (MI) terms between one-dimensional random projections of the random variables. It serves as a surrogate measure of dependence to classic MI that preserves many…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Ziv Goldfeld , Kristjan Greenewald , Theshani Nuradha , Galen Reeves

Conditional estimation given specific covariate values (i.e., local conditional estimation or functional estimation) is ubiquitously useful with applications in engineering, social and natural sciences. Existing data-driven non-parametric…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-13 Viet Anh Nguyen , Fan Zhang , Jose Blanchet , Erick Delage , Yinyu Ye

We propose a test of independence of two multivariate random vectors, given a sample from the underlying population. Our approach, which we call MINT, is based on the estimation of mutual information, whose decomposition into joint and…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-11-20 Thomas B. Berrett , Richard J. Samworth

We introduce a novel Mutual Information (MI) estimator that fundamentally reframes the discriminative approach. Instead of training a classifier to discriminate between joint and marginal distributions, we learn a normalizing flow that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Ivan Butakov , Alexander Semenenko , Valeriya Kirova , Alexey Frolov , Ivan Oseledets

The conditional mutual information quantifies the conditional dependence of two random variables. It has numerous applications; it forms, for example, part of the definition of transfer entropy, a common measure of the causal relationship…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-04-15 Jake Witter , Conor Houghton

The ability to compress observational data and accurately estimate physical parameters relies heavily on informative summary statistics. In this paper, we introduce the use of mutual information (MI) as a means of evaluating the quality of…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2023-07-12 Ce Sui , Xiaosheng Zhao , Tao Jing , Yi Mao

Diffusion bridge models in both continuous and discrete state spaces have recently become powerful tools in the field of generative modeling. In this work, we leverage the discrete state space formulation of bridge matching models to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Iryna Zabarianska , Sergei Kholkin , Grigoriy Ksenofontov , Ivan Butakov , Alexander Korotin

We study some of the most commonly used mutual information estimators, based on histograms of fixed or adaptive bin size, $k$-nearest neighbors and kernels, and focus on optimal selection of their free parameters. We examine the consistency…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2015-05-13 Angeliki Papana , Dimitris Kugiumtzis

This paper proposes a geometric estimator of dependency between a pair of multivariate samples. The proposed estimator of dependency is based on a randomly permuted geometric graph (the minimal spanning tree) over the two multivariate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-02 Salimeh Yasaei Sekeh , Alfred O. Hero

Recent advances in statistical learning theory have revealed profound connections between mutual information (MI) bounds, PAC-Bayesian theory, and Bayesian nonparametrics. This work introduces a novel mutual information bound for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-18 El Mahdi Khribch , Pierre Alquier

We present simple and computationally efficient nonparametric estimators of R\'enyi entropy and mutual information based on an i.i.d. sample drawn from an unknown, absolutely continuous distribution over $\R^d$. The estimators are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2010-10-27 Dávid Pál , Barnabás Póczos , Csaba Szepesvári

Mutual information (MI) is a promising candidate measure for the assessment and optimization of localization systems, as it captures nonlinear dependencies between random variables. However, the high cost of computing MI, especially for…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-04 Sven Hinderer , Manuel Buchfink , Bin Yang

The maximal information coefficient (MIC), which measures the amount of dependence between two variables, is able to detect both linear and non-linear associations. However, computational cost grows rapidly as a function of the dataset…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2015-08-18 Ali Mousavi , Richard G. Baraniuk

Recently, the importance of analysing data and collecting valuable insight efficiently has been increasing in various fields. Estimating mutual information (MI) plays a critical role to investigate the relationship among multiple random…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-03-10 Yota Maeda , Hideaki Kawaguchi , Hiroyuki Tezuka

The conditional mutual information I(X;Y|Z) measures the average information that X and Y contain about each other given Z. This is an important primitive in many learning problems including conditional independence testing, graphical model…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2017-10-16 Arman Rahimzamani , Sreeram Kannan

Estimating mutual information from i.i.d. samples drawn from an unknown joint density function is a basic statistical problem of broad interest with multitudinous applications. The most popular estimator is one proposed by Kraskov and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-08-11 Weihao Gao , Sewoong Oh , Pramod Viswanath

Estimation of mutual information between random variables has become crucial in a range of fields, from physics to neuroscience to finance. Estimating information accurately over a wide range of conditions relies on the development of…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-11-14 Houman Safaai , Arno Onken , Christopher D. Harvey , Stefano Panzeri

Recently, Mutual Information (MI) has attracted attention in bounding the generalization error of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However, it is intractable to accurately estimate the MI in DNNs, thus most previous works have to relax the MI…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-21 Xinjie Lan , Kenneth Barner