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Related papers: On the Estimation of Mutual Information

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Estimating mutual information (MI) between two continuous random variables $X$ and $Y$ allows to capture non-linear dependencies between them, non-parametrically. As such, MI estimation lies at the core of many data science applications.…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Alexander Marx , Jonas Fischer

Mutual information is fundamentally important for measuring statistical dependence between variables and for quantifying information transfer by signaling and communication mechanisms. It can, however, be challenging to evaluate for…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2014-07-29 Clive G. Bowsher , Margaritis Voliotis

Variational approaches based on neural networks are showing promise for estimating mutual information (MI) between high dimensional variables. However, they can be difficult to use in practice due to poorly understood bias/variance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-25 Jiaming Song , Stefano Ermon

The data for many classification problems, such as pattern and speech recognition, follow mixture distributions. To quantify the optimum performance for classification tasks, the Shannon mutual information is a natural information-theoretic…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-06-22 Yijun Ding , Amit Ashok

Estimating the mutual information from samples from a joint distribution is a challenging problem in both science and engineering. In this work, we realize a variational bound that generalizes both discriminative and generative approaches.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-05 Marco Federici , David Ruhe , Patrick Forré

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 is widely used in artificial intelligence, in a descriptive way, to measure the stochastic dependence of discrete random variables. In order to address questions such as the reliability of the empirical value, one must…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2008-06-26 Marco Zaffalon , Marcus Hutter

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

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-08-08 Marco Zaffalon , Marcus Hutter

Determining the strength of non-linear statistical dependencies between two variables is a crucial matter in many research fields. The established measure for quantifying such relations is the mutual information. However, estimating mutual…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2019-07-24 Damián G. Hernández , Inés Samengo

Estimating Mutual Information (MI), a key measure of dependence of random quantities without specific modelling assumptions, is a challenging problem in high dimensions. We propose a novel mutual information estimator based on parametrizing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-24 Haoran Ni , Martin Lotz

The estimation of mutual information (MI) or conditional mutual information (CMI) from a set of samples is a long-standing problem. A recent line of work in this area has leveraged the approximation power of artificial neural networks and…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Sina Molavipour , Germán Bassi , Mikael Skoglund

Estimators for mutual information are typically biased. However, in the case of the Kozachenko-Leonenko estimator for metric spaces, a type of nearest neighbour estimator, it is possible to calculate the bias explicitly.

Information Theory · Computer Science 2021-05-19 Jake Witter , Conor Houghton

Measuring mutual information from finite data is difficult. Recent work has considered variational methods maximizing a lower bound. In this paper, we prove that serious statistical limitations are inherent to any method of measuring mutual…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-05-21 David McAllester , Karl Stratos

Mutual information $I(X;Y)$ is a useful definition in information theory to estimate how much information the random variable $Y$ holds about the random variable $X$. One way to define the mutual information is by comparing the joint…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-04-14 Bulut Kuskonmaz , Jaron Skovsted Gundersen , Rafal Wisniewski

This paper compares and evaluates a set of non-parametric mutual information estimators with the goal of providing a novel toolset to progress in the analysis of the capacity of the nonlinear optical channel, which is currently an open…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-01-25 Tommaso Catuogno , Menelaos Ralli Camara , Marco Secondini

We study robust estimators of the mean of a probability measure $P$, called robust empirical mean estimators. This elementary construction is then used to revisit a problem of aggregation and a problem of estimator selection, extending…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-07-05 M. Lerasle , R. I. Oliveira

The information theoretic quantity known as mutual information finds wide use in classification and community detection analyses to compare two classifications of the same set of objects into groups. In the context of classification…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2020-04-29 M. E. J. Newman , George T. Cantwell , Jean-Gabriel Young

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

Fields like public health, public policy, and social science often want to quantify the degree of dependence between variables whose relationships take on unknown functional forms. Typically, in fact, researchers in these fields are…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-12-10 Octavio César Mesner , Cosma Rohilla Shalizi

The selection of features that are relevant for a prediction or classification problem is an important problem in many domains involving high-dimensional data. Selecting features helps fighting the curse of dimensionality, improving the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2009-09-04 Michel Verleysen , Fabrice Rossi , Damien François