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We develop a fully non-parametric, easy-to-use, and powerful test for the missing completely at random (MCAR) assumption on the missingness mechanism of a dataset. The test compares distributions of different missing patterns on random…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-12-01 Meta-Lina Spohn , Jeffrey Näf , Loris Michel , Nicolai Meinshausen

We suggest new recursive formulas to compute the exact value of the Kullback-Leibler distance (KLD) between two general Hidden Markov Trees (HMTs). For homogeneous HMTs with regular topology, such as homogeneous Hidden Markov Models (HMMs),…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2012-10-10 Vittorio Perduca , Grégory Nuel

Discrete normal distributions are defined as the distributions with prescribed means and covariance matrices which maximize entropy on the integer lattice support. The set of discrete normal distributions form an exponential family with…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-01-25 Frank Nielsen

Pearson's chi-squared test is widely used to assess the uniformity of discrete histograms, typically relying on a continuous chi-squared distribution to approximate the test statistic, since computing the exact distribution is…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-01 Nikola Banić , Neven Elezović

This short note is on a property of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence which indicates that independent Gaussian distributions minimize the KL divergence from given independent Gaussian distributions. The primary purpose of this note is…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Song Fang , Quanyan Zhu

We derive a new variational formula for the R\'enyi family of divergences, $R_\alpha(Q\|P)$, between probability measures $Q$ and $P$. Our result generalizes the classical Donsker-Varadhan variational formula for the Kullback-Leibler…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-21 Jeremiah Birrell , Paul Dupuis , Markos A. Katsoulakis , Luc Rey-Bellet , Jie Wang

A common way to quantify the ,,distance'' between measures is via their discrepancy, also known as maximum mean discrepancy (MMD). Discrepancies are related to Sinkhorn divergences $S_\varepsilon$ with appropriate cost functions as…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-08-25 Sebastian Neumayer , Gabriele Steidl

In this paper, we identify a class of absolutely continuous probability distributions, and show that the differential entropy is uniformly convergent over this space under the metric of total variation distance. One of the advantages of…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-01-03 Hamid Ghourchian , Amin Gohari , Arash Amini

The $f$-divergence is a fundamental notion that measures the difference between two distributions. In this paper, we study the problem of approximating the $f$-divergence between two Ising models, which is a generalization of recent work on…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Weiming Feng , Yucheng Fu

The TCP window size process appears in the modeling of the famous Transmission Control Protocol used for data transmission over the Internet. This continuous time Markov process takes its values in [0, \infty), is ergodic and irreversible.…

Kernel embeddings of distributions and the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), the resulting distance between distributions, are useful tools for fully nonparametric two-sample testing and learning on distributions. However, it is rarely that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-07 Ho Chung Leon Law , Christopher Yau , Dino Sejdinovic

The $2$-Wasserstein distance is sensitive to minor geometric differences between distributions, making it a very powerful dissimilarity metric. However, due to this sensitivity, a small outlier mass can also cause a significant increase in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Sharath Raghvendra , Pouyan Shirzadian , Kaiyi Zhang

Collaborative filtering, a widely-used recommendation technique, predicts a user's preference by aggregating the ratings from similar users. As a result, these measures cannot fully utilize the rating information and are not suitable for…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-12-11 Yitong Meng , Xinyan Dai , Xiao Yan , James Cheng , Weiwen Liu , Benben Liao , Jun Guo , Guangyong Chen

Obtaining an accurate estimate of the underlying covariance matrix from finite sample size data is challenging due to sample size noise. In recent years, sophisticated covariance-cleaning techniques based on random matrix theory have been…

Computation · Statistics 2024-11-11 Christian Bongiorno , Lamia Lamrani

To analyze the security of code-based cryptosystems, the smoothing parameter, which is closely related to the total variation distance of codes, has been investigated. While previous studies have bounded this distance using the Fourier…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Tsuyoshi Miezaki , Yusaku Nishimura , Katsuyuki Takashima

Kullback-Leibler (KL) control enables efficient numerical methods for nonlinear optimal control problems. The crucial assumption of KL control is the full controllability of the transition distribution. However, this assumption is often…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-03-25 Kaito Ito , Kenji Kashima

We consider a sequence of identically independently distributed random samples from an absolutely continuous probability measure in one dimension with unbounded density. We establish a new rate of convergence of the $\infty-$Wasserstein…

Probability · Mathematics 2018-08-03 Anning Liu , Jian-Guo Liu , Yulong Lu

Density-based directed distances -- particularly known as divergences -- between probability distributions are widely used in statistics as well as in the adjacent research fields of information theory, artificial intelligence and machine…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-03-03 Michel Broniatowski , Wolfgang Stummer

When two different parties use the same learning rule on their own data, how can we test whether the distributions of the two outcomes are similar? In this paper, we study the similarity of outcomes of learning rules through the lens of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Alkis Kalavasis , Amin Karbasi , Shay Moran , Grigoris Velegkas

This work establishes computable bounds between f-divergences for probability measures within a generalized quasi-$\varepsilon_{(M,m)}$-neighborhood framework. We make the following key contributions. (1) a unified characterization of local…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Xinchun Yu , Shuangqing Wei , Xiao-Ping Zhang