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Related papers: Testing (Conditional) Mutual Information

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Mutual information is a widely-used information theoretic measure to quantify the amount of association between variables. It is used extensively in many applications such as image registration, diagnosis of failures in electrical machines,…

Computation · Statistics 2021-08-21 Luai Al-Labadi , Forough Fazeli-Asl , Zahra Saberi

We propose a test of the conditional independence of random variables $X$ and~$Y$ given~$Z$ under the additional assumption that $X$ is stochastically nondecreasing in~$Z$. The well-documented hardness of testing conditional independence…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-24 Rohan Hore , Jake A. Soloff , Rina Foygel Barber , Richard J. Samworth

Testing conditional independence between two random vectors given a third is a fundamental and challenging problem in statistics, particularly in multivariate nonparametric settings due to the complexity of conditional structures. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-28 Chenxuan He , Yuan Gao , Liping Zhu , Jian Huang

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

We propose three measures of mutual dependence between multiple random vectors. All the measures are zero if and only if the random vectors are mutually independent. The first measure generalizes distance covariance from pairwise dependence…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-05-18 Ze Jin , David S. Matteson

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

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

Mutual information (MI) is a fundamental measure of statistical dependence between two variables, yet accurate estimation from finite data remains notoriously difficult. No estimator is universally reliable, and common approaches fail in…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2025-10-02 Eslam Abdelaleem , K. Michael Martini , Ilya Nemenman

We derive independence tests by means of dependence measures thresholding in a semiparametric context. Precisely, estimates of phi-mutual informations, associated to phi-divergences between a joint distribution and the product distribution…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-08-20 Amor Keziou , Philippe Regnault

Conditional independence testing is a key problem required by many machine learning and statistics tools. In particular, it is one way of evaluating the usefulness of some features on a supervised prediction problem. We propose a novel…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-08-02 Marco Henrique de Almeida Inácio , Rafael Izbicki , Rafael Bassi Stern

As a crucial problem in statistics is to decide whether additional variables are needed in a regression model. We propose a new multivariate test to investigate the conditional mean independence of Y given X conditioning on some known…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-05-18 Ze Jin , Xiaohan Yan , David S. Matteson

Estimation of information theoretic quantities such as mutual information and its conditional variant has drawn interest in recent times owing to their multifaceted applications. Newly proposed neural estimators for these quantities have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-24 Arnab Kumar Mondal , Arnab Bhattacharya , Sudipto Mukherjee , Prathosh AP , Sreeram Kannan , Himanshu Asnani

Estimating mutual information (MI) from samples is a fundamental problem in statistics, machine learning, and data analysis. Recently it was shown that a popular class of non-parametric MI estimators perform very poorly for strongly…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2016-02-18 Shuyang Gao , Greg Ver Steeg , Aram Galstyan

Sampling algorithms play a pivotal role in probabilistic AI. However, verifying if a sampler program indeed samples from the claimed distribution is a notoriously hard problem. Provably correct testers like Barbarik, Teq, Flash, CubeProbe…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Rishiraj Bhattacharyya , Sourav Chakraborty , Yash Pote , Uddalok Sarkar , Sayantan Sen

A collaborative distributed binary decision problem is considered. Two statisticians are required to declare the correct probability measure of two jointly distributed memoryless process, denoted by $X^n=(X_1,\dots,X_n)$ and…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2016-04-11 Gil Katz , Pablo Piantanida , Merouane Debbah

Testing hypothesis of independence between two random elements on a joint alphabet is a fundamental exercise in statistics. Pearson's chi-squared test is an effective test for such a situation when the contingency table is relatively small.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-03-19 Jialin Zhang , Zhiyi Zhang

For a continuous random variable $Z$, testing conditional independence $X \perp\!\!\!\perp Y |Z$ is known to be a particularly hard problem. It constitutes a key ingredient of many constraint-based causal discovery algorithms. These…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-12-21 Philip A. Boeken , Joris M. Mooij

Given well-shuffled data, can we determine whether the data items are statistically (in)dependent? Formally, we consider the problem of testing whether a set of exchangeable random variables are independent. We will show that this is…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-10-25 Marcus Hutter

We propose a new nonparametric test for the supposition of independence between two continuous random variables. The test is based on the size of the longest increasing subsequence of a random permutation. We identified the independence…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-03-13 Jesus E. Garcia , Veronica A. Gonzalez-Lopez

Measuring conditional dependencies among the variables of a network is of great interest to many disciplines. This paper studies some shortcomings of the existing dependency measures in detecting direct causal influences or their lack of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-06-05 Jalal Etesami , Kun Zhang , Negar Kiyavash