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Estimating the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between two distributions given samples from them is well-studied in machine learning and information theory. Motivated by considerations of multi-group fairness, we seek KL divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Parikshit Gopalan , Nina Narodytska , Omer Reingold , Vatsal Sharan , Udi Wieder

This paper deals with the problem of estimating predictive densities of a matrix-variate normal distribution with known covariance matrix. Our main aim is to establish some Bayesian predictive densities related to matricial shrinkage…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-04-03 Hisayuki Tsukuma , Tatsuya Kubokawa

Estimating the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between random variables is a fundamental problem in statistical analysis. For continuous random variables, traditional information-theoretic estimators scale poorly with dimension and/or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Mikil Foss , Andrew Lamperski

There are many applications that benefit from computing the exact divergence between 2 discrete probability measures, including machine learning. Unfortunately, in the absence of any assumptions on the structure or independencies within…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-16 Loong Kuan Lee , Nico Piatkowski , François Petitjean , Geoffrey I. Webb

The problem of estimating the Kullback-Leibler divergence $D(P\|Q)$ between two unknown distributions $P$ and $Q$ is studied, under the assumption that the alphabet size $k$ of the distributions can scale to infinity. The estimation is…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-02-22 Yuheng Bu , Shaofeng Zou , Yingbin Liang , Venugopal V. Veeravalli

Estimating Kullback-Leibler divergence from identical and independently distributed samples is an important problem in various domains. One simple and effective estimator is based on the k nearest neighbor distances between these samples.…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-02-27 Puning Zhao , Lifeng Lai

We study Gaussian approximations to the distribution of a diffusion. The approximations are easy to compute: they are defined by two simple ordinary differential equations for the mean and the covariance. Time correlations can also be…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-05-20 Daniel Sanz-Alonso , Andrew M. Stuart

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…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2019-10-22 Jay Mardia , Jiantao Jiao , Ervin Tánczos , Robert D. Nowak , Tsachy Weissman

The characteristic function of the folded normal distribution and its moment function are derived. The entropy of the folded normal distribution and the Kullback--Leibler from the normal and half normal distributions are approximated using…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-02-17 Michail Tsagris , Christina Beneki , Hossein Hassani

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-09-06 Luc Pronzato , Henry Wynn , Anatoly Zhigljavsky

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is frequently used in data science. For discrete distributions on large state spaces, approximations of probability vectors may result in a few small negative entries, rendering the KL divergence…

In this work we introduce a family of transformations, named \textit{divergence transformations}, interpolating between any pair of probability density functions sharing the same support. We prove the remarkable property that the whole…

Mathematical Physics · Physics 2025-12-15 Razvan Gabriel Iagar , David Puertas-Centeno , Elio V. Toranzo

By calculating the Kullback-Leibler divergence between two probability measures belonging to different exponential families, we end up with a formula that generalizes the ordinary Fenchel-Young divergence. Inspired by this formula, we…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-12-20 Frank Nielsen

We propose a general algorithm for approximating nonstandard Bayesian posterior distributions. The algorithm minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence of an approximating distribution to the intractable posterior distribution. Our method…

Computation · Statistics 2014-07-29 Tim Salimans , David A. Knowles

Bayesian nonparametric statistics is an area of considerable research interest. While recently there has been an extensive concentration in developing Bayesian nonparametric procedures for model checking, the use of the Dirichlet process,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-03-15 Luai Al-Labadi , Viskakh Patel , Kasra Vakiloroayaei , Clement Wan

The Kullback-Leibler divergence or relative entropy is an information-theoretic measure between statistical models that play an important role in measuring a distance between random variables. In the study of complex systems, random fields…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-03-25 Alexandre L. M. Levada

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

In this paper we provide the asymptotic theory of the general of $\phi$-divergences measures, which includes the most common divergence measures : Renyi and Tsallis families and the Kullback-Leibler measure. Instead of using the Parzen…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-04-18 Gane Samb Lo , Amadou Diadié Ba , Diam Ba

We consider the problem of sampling from a probability distribution $\pi$ which admits a density w.r.t. a dominating measure. It is well known that this can be written as an optimisation problem over the space of probability distributions…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-06 Francesca Romana Crucinio

Several scalable sample-based methods to compute the Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence between two distributions have been proposed and applied in large-scale machine learning models. While they have been found to be unstable, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Sandesh Ghimire , Prashnna K Gyawali , Linwei Wang