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Gathering the most information by picking the least amount of data is a common task in experimental design or when exploring an unknown environment in reinforcement learning and robotics. A widely used measure for quantifying the…
Estimating the Shannon entropy of a discrete distribution from which we have only observed a small sample is challenging. Estimating other information-theoretic metrics, such as the Kullback-Leibler divergence between two sparsely sampled…
We consider the problem of estimating the expected value of information (the knowledge gradient) for Bayesian learning problems where the belief model is nonlinear in the parameters. Our goal is to maximize some metric, while simultaneously…
Boolean network models of strongly connected modules are capable of capturing the high regulatory complexity of many biological gene regulatory circuits. We study numerically the previously introduced basin entropy, a parameter for the…
Given the constant rise in quantity and quality of data obtained from neural systems on many scales ranging from molecular to systems', information-theoretic analyses became increasingly necessary during the past few decades in the…
This paper modifies Jaynes's axioms of plausible reasoning and derives the minimum relative entropy principle, Bayes's rule, as well as maximum likelihood from first principles. The new axioms, which I call the Optimum Information…
We translate the problem of calculating the entropy of a set of binary configurations/signals into a sequence of supervised classification tasks. Subsequently, one can use virtually any machine learning classification algorithm for…
Finding interdependency relations between (possibly multivariate) time series provides valuable knowledge about the processes that generate the signals. Information theory sets a natural framework for non-parametric measures of several…
When constructing models of the world, we aim for optimal compressions: models that include as few details as possible while remaining as accurate as possible. But which details -- or features measured in data -- should we choose to include…
Transfer entropy is a widely used measure for quantifying directed information flows in complex systems. While the challenges of estimating transfer entropy for continuous data are well known, it has two major shortcomings for data of…
Language prediction is constrained by informational entropy intrinsic to language, such that there exists a limit to how accurate any language model can become and equivalently a lower bound to language compression. The most efficient…
We characterize the statistical bootstrap for the estimation of information-theoretic quantities from data, with particular reference to its use in the study of large-scale social phenomena. Our methods allow one to preserve, approximately,…
During a spontaneous change, a macroscopic physical system will evolve towards a macro-state with more realizations. This observation is at the basis of the Statistical Mechanical version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and it provides…
Entropy is a measure of self-information which is used to quantify losses. Entropy was developed in thermodynamics, but is also used to compare probabilities based on their deviating information content. Corresponding model uncertainty is…
Humans and other animals behave as if we perform fast Bayesian inference underlying decisions and movement control given uncertain sense data. Here we show that a biophysically realistic model of the subthreshold membrane potential of a…
Maximum Entropy is a powerful concept that entails a sharp separation between relevant and irrelevant variables. It is typically invoked in inference, once an assumption is made on what the relevant variables are, in order to estimate a…
This chapter provides a comprehensive and self-contained discussion of the most recent developments of information theory of networks. Maximum entropy models of networks are the least biased ensembles enforcing a set of constraints and are…
Maximum entropy principle (MEP) offers an effective and unbiased approach to inferring unknown probability distributions when faced with incomplete information, while neural networks provide the flexibility to learn complex distributions…
A new combinatorial-probabilistic diagnostic entropy has been introduced. It describes the pair-wise sum of probabilities of system conditions that have to be distinguished during the diagnosing process. The proposed measure describes the…
Information plays an important role in our understanding of the physical world. We hence propose an entropic measure of information for any physical theory that admits systems, states and measurements. In the quantum and classical world,…