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Related papers: Estimating the Mutual Information between two Disc…

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We investigate the sample complexity of mutual information and conditional mutual information testing. For conditional mutual information testing, given access to independent samples of a triple of random variables $(A, B, C)$ with unknown…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Jan Seyfried , Sayantan Sen , Marco Tomamichel

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

Conditional mutual information is important in the selection and interpretation of graphical models. Its empirical version is well known as a generalised likelihood ratio test and that it may be represented as a difference in entropy. We…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-01-20 Joe Whittaker , Florian Martin , Yang Xiang

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

One of the most fundamental questions one can ask about a pair of random variables X and Y is the value of their mutual information. Unfortunately, this task is often stymied by the extremely large dimension of the variables. We might hope…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2017-06-21 Ryan G. James , John R. Mahoney , James P. Crutchfield

Entropy is a measure of heterogeneity widely used in applied sciences, often when data are collected over space. Recently, a number of approaches has been proposed to include spatial information in entropy. The aim of entropy is to…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-11-12 Linda Altieri , Daniela Cocchi , Giulia Roli

In this paper a numerical method is presented, which finds a lower bound for the mutual information between a binary and an arbitrary finite random variable with joint distributions that have a variational distance not greater than a known…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2013-01-29 A. G. Stefani , J. B. Huber , C. Jardin , H. Sticht

Estimating the entropy of a discrete random variable is a fundamental problem in information theory and related fields. This problem has many applications in various domains, including machine learning, statistics and data compression. Over…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-12-22 Yuval Shalev , Amichai Painsky , Irad Ben-Gal

Estimating the Shannon entropy of a discrete distribution from which we have only observed a small sample is challenging. Estimating other information-theoretic metrics, such as the Kullback-Leibler divergence between two sparsely sampled…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2023-02-24 Angelo Piga , Lluc Font-Pomarol , Marta Sales-Pardo , Roger Guimerà

We study the problem of using i.i.d. samples from an unknown multivariate probability distribution $p$ to estimate the mutual information of $p$. This problem has recently received attention in two settings: (1) where $p$ is assumed to be…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-02-28 Shashank Singh , Barnabás Pøczos

A fundamental problem in analysis of complex systems is getting a reliable estimate of entropy of their probability distributions over the state space. This is difficult because unsampled states can contribute substantially to the entropy,…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2023-07-19 Damián G. Hernández , Ahmed Roman , Ilya Nemenman

Estimating information-theoretic quantities such as entropy and mutual information is central to many problems in statistics and machine learning, but challenging in high dimensions. This paper presents estimators of entropy via inference…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-13 Feras A. Saad , Marco Cusumano-Towner , Vikash K. Mansinghka

Mutual information is widely used, in a descriptive way, to measure the stochastic dependence of categorical random variables. In order to address questions such as the reliability of the descriptive value, one must consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2007-07-13 Marcus Hutter , Marco Zaffalon

An informative sampling design leads to the selection of units whose inclusion probabilities are correlated with the response variable of interest. Model inference performed on the resulting observed sample will be biased for the population…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-06-29 Matthew R. Williams , Terrance D. Savitsky

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

The mutual information (MI) between two random variables is an important correlation measure in data analysis. The Shannon entropy of a joint probability distribution is the variable part under fixed marginals. We aim to minimize and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-08 Paula Franke , Kay Hamacher , Paul Manns

By combining a bound on the absolute value of the difference of mutual information between two joint probablity distributions with a fixed variational distance, and a bound on the probability of a maximal deviation in variational distance…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2013-01-29 A. G. Stefani , J. B. Huber , C. Jardin , H. Sticht

We consider the problem of estimating mutual information between dependent data, an important problem in many science and engineering applications. We propose a data-driven, non-parametric estimator of mutual information in this paper. The…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2017-03-08 Rakesh Malladi , Don H Johnson , Behnaam Aazhang

Mutual information is a well-known tool to measure the mutual dependence between variables. In this paper, a Bayesian nonparametric estimation of mutual information is established by means of the Dirichlet process and the $k$-nearest…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-08-10 Luai Al-Labadi , Forough Fazeli Asl , Zahra Saberi

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