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Related papers: Estimating Mutual Information

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Mixture distributions arise in many parametric and non-parametric settings -- for example, in Gaussian mixture models and in non-parametric estimation. It is often necessary to compute the entropy of a mixture, but, in most cases, this…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Artemy Kolchinsky , Brendan D. Tracey

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

Estimating mutual information accurately is pivotal across diverse applications, from machine learning to communications and biology, enabling us to gain insights into the inner mechanisms of complex systems. Yet, dealing with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Nunzio A. Letizia , Nicola Novello , Andrea M. Tonello

Exponential models of distributions are widely used in machine learning for classiffication and modelling. It is well known that they can be interpreted as maximum entropy models under empirical expectation constraints. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-19 Amir Globerson , Naftali Tishby

Conditional Mutual Information (CMI) is a measure of conditional dependence between random variables X and Y, given another random variable Z. It can be used to quantify conditional dependence among variables in many data-driven inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Sudipto Mukherjee , Himanshu Asnani , Sreeram Kannan

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

A class of estimators of the R\'{e}nyi and Tsallis entropies of an unknown distribution $f$ in $\mathbb{R}^m$ is presented. These estimators are based on the $k$th nearest-neighbor distances computed from a sample of $N$ i.i.d. vectors with…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-11-16 Nikolai Leonenko , Luc Pronzato , Vippal Savani

Many statistical procedures, including goodness-of-fit tests and methods for independent component analysis, rely critically on the estimation of the entropy of a distribution. In this paper, we seek entropy estimators that are efficient…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-06-23 Thomas B. Berrett , Richard J. Samworth , Ming Yuan

Mutual information is a nonlinear measure used in time series analysis in order to measure the linear and non-linear correlations at any lag $\tau$. The aim of this study is to evaluate some of the most commonly used mutual information…

Chaotic Dynamics · Physics 2008-09-15 A. Papana , D. Kugiumtzis

Information theoretic measures (entropies, entropy rates, mutual information) are nowadays commonly used in statistical signal processing for real-world data analysis. The present work proposes the use of Auto Mutual Information (Mutual…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2019-07-24 C Granero-Belinchón , S. Roux , P. Abry , N. Garnier

The conditional mutual information I(X;Y|Z) measures the average information that X and Y contain about each other given Z. This is an important primitive in many learning problems including conditional independence testing, graphical model…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2017-10-16 Arman Rahimzamani , Sreeram Kannan

We propose a novel approach to the problem of mutual information (MI) estimation via introducing a family of estimators based on normalizing flows. The estimator maps original data to the target distribution, for which MI is easier to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Ivan Butakov , Alexander Tolmachev , Sofia Malanchuk , Anna Neopryatnaya , Alexey Frolov

Information estimates such as the ``direct method'' of Strong et al. (1998) sidestep the difficult problem of estimating the joint distribution of response and stimulus by instead estimating the difference between the marginal and…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2008-07-19 Vincent Q. Vu , Bin Yu , Robert E. Kass

We present estimators for entropy and other functions of a discrete probability distribution when the data is a finite sample drawn from that probability distribution. In particular, for the case when the probability distribution is a joint…

comp-gas · Physics 2008-02-03 David R. Wolf , David H. Wolpert

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

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

Entropy estimation is of practical importance in information theory and statistical science. Many existing entropy estimators suffer from fast growing estimation bias with respect to dimensionality, rendering them unsuitable for…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Ziqiao Ao , Jinglai Li

The mutual information between two jointly distributed random variables $X$ and $Y$ is a functional of the joint distribution $P_{XY},$ which is sometimes difficult to handle or estimate. A coarser description of the statistical behavior of…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2016-11-17 Yanjun Han , Or Ordentlich , Ofer Shayevitz

We present simple and computationally efficient nonparametric estimators of R\'enyi entropy and mutual information based on an i.i.d. sample drawn from an unknown, absolutely continuous distribution over $\R^d$. The estimators are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2010-10-27 Dávid Pál , Barnabás Póczos , Csaba Szepesvári