Related papers: Entropy and inference, revisited
Problems of probabilistic inference and decision making under uncertainty commonly involve continuous random variables. Often these are discretized to a few points, to simplify assessments and computations. An alternative approximation is…
We consider the problem of estimating Shannon's entropy $H$ from discrete data, in cases where the number of possible symbols is unknown or even countably infinite. The Pitman-Yor process, a generalization of Dirichlet process, provides a…
We consider Bayesian estimation of information-theoretic quantities from data, using a Dirichlet prior. Acknowledging the uncertainty of the event space size $m$ and the Dirichlet prior's concentration parameter $c$, we treat both as random…
The organization of high-dimensional probability spaces is a fundamental problem at the intersection of statistical physics and information theory. Here, we analyze the distributions populating level surfaces of the probability simplex…
Recent work of Acharya et al. (NeurIPS 2019) showed how to estimate the entropy of a distribution $\mathcal D$ over an alphabet of size $k$ up to $\pm\epsilon$ additive error by streaming over $(k/\epsilon^3) \cdot…
The method of maximum entropy has been very successful but there are cases where it has either failed or led to paradoxes that have cast doubt on its general legitimacy. My more optimistic assessment is that such failures and paradoxes…
We demonstrate that the principle of maximum relative entropy (ME), used judiciously, can ease the specification of priors in model selection problems. The resulting effect is that models that make sharp predictions are disfavoured,…
With the recently rapid development in deep learning, deep neural networks have been widely adopted in many real-life applications. However, deep neural networks are also known to have very little control over its uncertainty for unseen…
Entropy is a measure of heterogeneity widely used in applied sciences, often when data are collected over space. Recently, a number of approaches has been proposed to include spatial information in entropy. The aim of entropy is to…
It is shown how tools from the area of Model Theory, specifically from the Theory of o-minimality, can be used to prove that a class of functions is VC-subgraph (in the sense of Dudley, 1987), and therefore satisfies a uniform polynomial…
We give an algorithm for learning a mixture of {\em unstructured} distributions. This problem arises in various unsupervised learning scenarios, for example in learning {\em topic models} from a corpus of documents spanning several topics.…
Nonparametric mixture models based on the Dirichlet process are an elegant alternative to finite models when the number of underlying components is unknown, but inference in such models can be slow. Existing attempts to parallelize…
We derive the conjugate prior of the Dirichlet and beta distributions and explore it with numerical examples to gain an intuitive understanding of the distribution itself, its hyperparameters, and conditions concerning its convergence. Due…
In this monograph, we prove an asymptotic approximation for integrals of probability densities over sets in finite dimensional euclidean space, which are far away from the origin (asymptotic sets). We use this approximation to investigate…
In this paper, some general properties of Shannon information measures are investigated over sets of probability distributions with restricted marginals. Certain optimization problems associated with these functionals are shown to be…
We seek an entropy estimator for discrete distributions with fully empirical accuracy bounds. As stated, this goal is infeasible without some prior assumptions on the distribution. We discover that a certain information moment assumption…
This paper studies the behavior of the entropy numbers of classes of functions with bounded integral norms from a given finite dimensional linear subspace. Upper bounds of these entropy numbers in the uniform norm are obtained and applied…
In a recent paper, the authors proposed a general methodology for probabilistic learning on manifolds. The method was used to generate numerical samples that are statistically consistent with an existing dataset construed as a realization…
Entropy is a central concept in physics, but can be challenging to calculate even for systems that are easily simulated. This is exacerbated out of equilibrium, where generally little is known about the distribution characterizing simulated…
Convergence properties of Shannon Entropy are studied. In the differential setting, it is shown that weak convergence of probability measures, or convergence in distribution, is not enough for convergence of the associated differential…