English

Certain Relations between Mutual Information and Fidelity of Statistical Estimation

Applications 2010-10-08 v1 Information Theory math.IT

Abstract

I present several new relations between mutual information (MI) and statistical estimation error for a system that can be regarded simultaneously as a communication channel and as an estimator of an input parameter. I first derive a second-order result between MI and Fisher information (FI) that is valid for sufficiently narrow priors, but arbitrary channels. A second relation furnishes a lower bound on the MI in terms of the minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) on the Bayesian estimation of the input parameter from the channel output, one that is valid for arbitrary channels and priors. The existence of such a lower bound, while extending previous work relating the MI to the FI that is valid only in the asymptotic and high-SNR limits, elucidates further the fundamental connection between information and estimation theoretic measures of fidelity. The remaining relations I present are inequalities and correspondences among MI, FI, and MMSE in the presence of nuisance parameters.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1010.1508,
  title  = {Certain Relations between Mutual Information and Fidelity of Statistical Estimation},
  author = {Sudhakar Prasad},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1010.1508},
  year   = {2010}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T16:25:24.159Z