Related papers: A Short Note on the Jensen-Shannon Divergence betw…
In this technical report, we will make two observations concerning symmetries of the probability distribution resulting from projection of a piece of p-dimensional data onto a random m-dimensional subspace of $\mathbb{R}^p$, where m < p. In…
The conflation of a finite number of probability distributions P_1,..., P_n is a consolidation of those distributions into a single probability distribution Q=Q(P_1,..., P_n), where intuitively Q is the conditional distribution of…
In ordinary statistical mechanics the Boltzmann-Shannon entropy is related to the Maxwell-Bolzmann distribution $p_i$ by means of a twofold link. The first link is differential and is offered by the Jaynes Maximum Entropy Principle. The…
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…
George R. Terrell (1983, {Ann. Probab., vol. 11(3), pp. 823--826) showed that the Pearson coefficient of correlation of an ordered pair from a random sample of size two is at most one-half, and the equality is attained only for rectangular…
This paper introduces a new discrete distribution suggested by curtailed sampling rules common in early-stage clinical trials. We derive the distribution of the smallest number of independent Bernoulli(p) trials needed in order to observe…
This paper introduces constrained mixtures for continuous distributions, characterized by a mixture of distributions where each distribution has a shape similar to the base distribution and disjoint domains. This new concept is used to…
The Poisson distribution of order $k$ is a special case of a compound Poisson distribution. Its mean and variance are known, but results for its median and mode are difficult to obtain, although a few cases have been solved and upper/lower…
We show that for all $\psi$-mixing shifts distributions of the numbers of multiple recurrencies to shrinking cylindrical neighborhoods of all points are close either to Poisson or to compound Poisson distributions. We also describe…
In this paper, an alternative mixed Poisson distribution is proposed by amalgamating Poisson distribution and a modification of the Quasi Lindley distribution. Some fundamental structural properties of the new distribution, namely the shape…
We study the question of testing structured properties (classes) of discrete distributions. Specifically, given sample access to an arbitrary distribution $D$ over $[n]$ and a property $\mathcal{P}$, the goal is to distinguish between…
There has been significant study on the sample complexity of testing properties of distributions over large domains. For many properties, it is known that the sample complexity can be substantially smaller than the domain size. For example,…
Renyi's "thinning" operation on a discrete random variable is a natural discrete analog of the scaling operation for continuous random variables. The properties of thinning are investigated in an information-theoretic context, especially in…
In previous work the authors defined the k-th order simplicial distance between probability distributions which arises naturally from a measure of dispersion based on the squared volume of random simplices of dimension k. This theory is…
In this note we discuss additional properties of mixed Poisson distributions. We discuss the convergence of mixed Poisson distributions to its mixing distribution for the scaling parameter tending to infinity. Moreover, we obtain a central…
We first introduce the class of strictly quasiconvex and strictly quasiconcave Jensen divergences which are oriented (asymmetric) distances, and study some of their properties. We then define the strictly quasiconvex Bregman divergences as…
In this paper we propose the use of $\phi$-divergences as test statistics to verify simple hypotheses about a one-dimensional parametric diffusion process $\de X_t = b(X_t, \theta)\de t + \sigma(X_t, \theta)\de W_t$, from discrete…
Any discrete distribution with support on $\{0,\ldots, d\}$ can be constructed as the distribution of sums of Bernoulli variables. We prove that the class of $d$-dimensional Bernoulli variables $\boldsymbol{X}=(X_1,\ldots, X_d)$ whose sums…
The asymmetric skew divergence smooths one of the distributions by mixing it, to a degree determined by the parameter $\lambda$, with the other distribution. Such divergence is an approximation of the KL divergence that does not require the…
We introduce a novel parametric family of symmetric information-theoretic distances based on Jensen's inequality for a convex functional generator. In particular, this family unifies the celebrated Jeffreys divergence with the…