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Measure transport underpins several recent algorithms for posterior approximation in the Bayesian context, wherein a transport map is sought to minimise the Kullback--Leibler divergence (KLD) from the posterior to the approximation. The KLD…

Computation · Statistics 2020-10-27 Matthew A. Fisher , Tui Nolan , Matthew M. Graham , Dennis Prangle , Chris J. Oates

We consider the problem of clustering a sample of probability distributions from a random distribution on $\mathbb R^p$. Our proposed partitioning method makes use of a symmetric, positive-definite kernel $k$ and its associated reproducing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-23 Amparo Baíllo , Jose R. Berrendero , Martín Sánchez-Signorini

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 propose a closed-form spectral framework for relative log-density estimation in linearly parameterized probabilistic models, including unnormalized and conditional models. This is achieved by representing the Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Francis Bach

The forward Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is a ubiquitous objective for fitting a parameterized distribution to samples due to its tractability and equivalence to maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). Its inherent asymmetry, however, may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Omri Ben-Dov , Luiz F. O. Chamon

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

We consider the fundamental problem of estimating a discrete distribution on a domain of size $K$ with high probability in Kullback-Leibler divergence. We provide upper and lower bounds on the minimax estimation rate, which show that the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-23 Dirk van der Hoeven , Julia Olkhovskaia , Tim van Erven

Kernel mean embeddings have recently attracted the attention of the machine learning community. They map measures $\mu$ from some set $M$ to functions in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) with kernel $k$. The RKHS distance of two…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-18 Carl-Johann Simon-Gabriel , Bernhard Schölkopf

The Kullback-Leibler divergence, the Kullback-Leibler variation, and the Bernstein "norm" are used to quantify discrepancies among probability distributions in likelihood models such as nonparametric maximum likelihood and nonparametric…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-27 Tetsuya Kaji

In this paper, we derive a useful lower bound for the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KL-divergence) based on the Hammersley-Chapman-Robbins bound (HCRB). The HCRB states that the variance of an estimator is bounded from below by the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-11-05 Tomohiro Nishiyama

We study the problem of spectrum estimation from transmission data of a known phantom. The goal is to reconstruct an x-ray spectrum that can accurately model the x-ray transmission curves and reflects a realistic shape of the typical energy…

Medical Physics · Physics 2021-07-14 Wooseok Ha , Emil Y. Sidky , Rina Foygel Barber , Taly Gilat Schmidt , Xiaochuan Pan

We investigate statistical properties for a broad class of modern kernel-based regression (KBR) methods. These kernel methods were developed during the last decade and are inspired by convex risk minimization in infinite-dimensional Hilbert…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2009-09-29 Andreas Christmann , Ingo Steinwart

We examine the estimation of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and the use of the goodness-of-fit test for multivariate continuous distributions. Our starting point is the maximum entropy principle for Shannon entropy: among all…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Mehmet Siddik Cadirci , Martin Singull

Many two-sample problems call for a comparison of two distributions from an exponential family. Density ratio estimation methods provide ways to solve such problems through direct estimation of the differences in natural parameters. The…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-02-19 Erika Banzato , Mathias Drton , Kian Saraf-Poor , Hongjian Shi

In this paper, we consider the coefficient-based regularized distribution regression which aims to regress from probability measures to real-valued responses over a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), where the regularization is put on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-08-29 Yuan Mao , Lei Shi , Zheng-Chu Guo

Gradient flows of the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence, such as the Fokker--Planck equation and Stein Variational Gradient Descent, evolve a distribution toward a target density known only up to a normalizing constant. We introduce new…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-09 Elias Hess-Childs , Dejan Slepčev , Lantian Xu

In this paper, we discuss a property of the Kullback--Leibler divergence measured between two models of the family of the location-scale distributions. We show that, if model $M_1$ and model $M_2$ are represented by location-scale…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-04-08 Cristiano Villa

A Hilbert space embedding for probability measures has recently been proposed, with applications including dimensionality reduction, homogeneity testing, and independence testing. This embedding represents any probability measure as a mean…

We introduce a new version of the KL-divergence for Gaussian distributions which is based on Wasserstein geometry and referred to as WKL-divergence. We show that this version is consistent with the geometry of the sample space ${\Bbb R}^n$.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-29 Adwait Datar , Nihat Ay

Designing experiments that systematically gather data from complex physical systems is central to accelerating scientific discovery. While Bayesian experimental design (BED) provides a principled, information-based framework that integrates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Huchen Yang , Xinghao Dong , Jin-Long Wu