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$f$-divergences are a general class of divergences between probability measures which include as special cases many commonly used divergences in probability, mathematical statistics and information theory such as Kullback-Leibler…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-10-16 Adityanand Guntuboyina , Sujayam Saha , Geoffrey Schiebinger

For a multinomial distribution, suppose that we have prior knowledge of the sum of the probabilities of some categories. This allows us to construct a submodel in a full (i.e., no-restriction) model. Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE)…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-06-07 Yo Sheena

Variational Inference approximates an unnormalized distribution via the minimization of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. Although this divergence is efficient for computation and has been widely used in applications, it suffers from some…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-28 Mingxuan Yi , Song Liu

We compute the expected value of the Kullback-Leibler divergence to various fundamental statistical models with respect to canonical priors on the probability simplex. We obtain closed formulas for the expected model approximation errors,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-06-18 Guido F. Montufar , Johannes Rauh

This paper proposes and studies new quantum version of $f$-divergences, a class of convex functionals of a pair of probability distributions including Kullback-Leibler divergence, Rnyi-type relative entropy and so on. There are several…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2018-02-07 Keiji Matsumoto

In this paper, we derive a useful lower bound for the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KL-divergence) based on the Hammersley-Chapman-Robbins bound (HCRB). The HCRB states that the variance of an estimator is bounded from below by the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-11-05 Tomohiro Nishiyama

Selecting an appropriate divergence measure is a critical aspect of machine learning, as it directly impacts model performance. Among the most widely used, we find the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, originally introduced in kinetic…

Mathematical Physics · Physics 2025-07-16 Gennaro Auricchio , Giovanni Brigati , Paolo Giudici , Giuseppe Toscani

Causal discovery from observational data underpins applications in finance, climate modeling, and machine learning. Constraint-based causal discovery reduces structure learning to a sequence of conditional independence (CI) tests, where…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-05-05 Shabnam Sodagari

In this paper we propose a dimension-reduction strategy in order to improve the performance of importance sampling in high dimension. The idea is to estimate variance terms in a small number of suitably chosen directions. We first prove…

Computation · Statistics 2022-03-24 Maxime ElMasri , Jérôme Morio , Florian Simatos

We provide optimal lower and upper bounds for the augmented Kullback-Leibler divergence in terms of the augmented total variation distance between two probability measures defined on two Euclidean spaces having different dimensions. We call…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-11-03 Michele Caprio

The deepening penetration of renewable resources into power systems entails great difficulties that have not been surmounted satisfactorily. An issue that merits special attention is the short-term planning of power systems under net load…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-12-15 Ogun Yurdakul , Fikret Sivrikaya , Sahin Albayrak

This paper addresses the problem of approximating an unknown probability distribution with density $f$ -- which can only be evaluated up to an unknown scaling factor -- with the help of a sequential algorithm that produces at each iteration…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-09-23 Pascal Bianchi , Bernard Delyon , Victor Priser , François Portier

The families of $f$-divergences (e.g. the Kullback-Leibler divergence) and Integral Probability Metrics (e.g. total variation distance or maximum mean discrepancies) are widely used to quantify the similarity between probability…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-06-08 Rohit Agrawal , Thibaut Horel

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

Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is a fundamental concept in information theory that quantifies the discrepancy between two probability distributions. In the context of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), it serves as a central regularization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Andrés Muñoz , Rodrigo Ramele

We consider model-based reinforcement learning in finite Markov De- cision Processes (MDPs), focussing on so-called optimistic strategies. In MDPs, optimism can be implemented by carrying out extended value it- erations under a constraint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-09-22 Sarah Filippi , Olivier Cappé , Aurélien Garivier

This study tackles the efficient estimation of Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence in Dirichlet Mixture Models (DMM), crucial for clustering compositional data. Despite the significance of DMMs, obtaining an analytically tractable solution for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-20 Samyajoy Pal , Christian Heumann

The probability density quantile (pdQ) carries essential information regarding shape and tail behavior of a location-scale family. Convergence of repeated applications of the pdQ mapping to the uniform distribution is investigated and new…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-05-23 Robert Staudte , Aihua Xia

We present theoretical properties of the log-concave maximum likelihood estimator of a density based on an independent and identically distributed sample in $\mathbb{R}^d$. Our study covers both the case where the true underlying density is…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2009-09-01 Madeleine Cule , Richard Samworth

Information-theoretic measures such as the entropy, cross-entropy and the Kullback-Leibler divergence between two mixture models is a core primitive in many signal processing tasks. Since the Kullback-Leibler divergence of mixtures provably…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-01 Frank Nielsen , Ke Sun