Related papers: Estimation of KL Divergence: Optimal Minimax Rate
We consider estimating the predictive density under Kullback-Leibler loss in a high-dimensional Gaussian model. Decision theoretic properties of the within-family prediction error -- the minimal risk among estimates in the class…
The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is a fundamental equation of information theory that quantifies the proximity of two probability distributions. Although difficult to understand by examining the equation, an intuition and understanding…
For a parametric model of distributions, the closest distribution in the model to the true distribution located outside the model is considered. Measuring the closeness between two distributions with the Kullback-Leibler (K-L) divergence,…
This paper provides a unified perspective for the Kullback-Leibler (KL)-divergence and the integral probability metrics (IPMs) from the perspective of maximum likelihood density-ratio estimation (DRE). Both the KL-divergence and the IPMs…
Consider the problem of estimating the Shannon entropy of a distribution over $k$ elements from $n$ independent samples. We show that the minimax mean-square error is within universal multiplicative constant factors of $$\Big(\frac{k }{n…
This paper deals with maximization of classical $f$-divergence between the distributions of a measurement outputs of a given pair of quantum states. $f$-divergence $D_{f}$ between the probability density functions $p_{1}$ and $p_{2}$ over a…
We study three fundamental statistical-learning problems: distribution estimation, property estimation, and property testing. We establish the profile maximum likelihood (PML) estimator as the first unified sample-optimal approach to a wide…
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…
We derive a deterministic, non-asymptotic upper bound on the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence of the flow-matching distribution approximation. In particular, if the $L_2$ flow-matching loss is bounded by $\epsilon^2 > 0$, then the KL…
We consider the parameter estimation problem of a probabilistic generative model prescribed using a natural exponential family of distributions. For this problem, the typical maximum likelihood estimator usually overfits under limited…
We consider estimating the predictive density under Kullback-Leibler loss in an $\ell_0$ sparse Gaussian sequence model. Explicit expressions of the first order minimax risk along with its exact constant, asymptotically least favorable…
We employ a parameter-free distribution estimation framework where estimators are random distributions and utilize the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence as a loss function. Wu and Vos [J. Statist. Plann. Inference 142 (2012) 1525-1536] show…
Estimating Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence from samples of two distributions is essential in many machine learning problems. Variational methods using neural network discriminator have been proposed to achieve this task in a scalable…
We study concentration inequalities for the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence between the empirical distribution and the true distribution. Applying a recursion technique, we improve over the method of types bound uniformly in all regimes…
We consider the problem of constructing a least conservative estimator of the expected value $\mu$ of a non-negative heavy-tailed random variable. We require that the probability of overestimating the expected value $\mu$ is kept…
In many applications in biology, engineering and economics, identifying similarities and differences between distributions of data from complex processes requires comparing finite categorical samples of discrete counts. Statistical…
Given an intractable distribution $p$, the problem of variational inference (VI) is to find the best approximation from some more tractable family $Q$. Commonly, one chooses $Q$ to be a family of factorized distributions (i.e., the…
Pinsker's widely used inequality upper-bounds the total variation distance $||P-Q||_1$ in terms of the Kullback-Leibler divergence $D(P||Q)$. Although in general a bound in the reverse direction is impossible, in many applications the…
Wide conditions are provided to guarantee asymptotic unbiasedness and L^2-consistency of the introduced estimates of the Kullback-Leibler divergence for probability measures in R^d having densities w.r.t. the Lebesgue measure. These…
We address the problem of Schr\"odinger potential estimation, which plays a crucial role in modern generative modelling approaches based on Schr\"odinger bridges and stochastic optimal control for SDEs. Given a simple prior diffusion…