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On $f$-divergences between Cauchy distributions

Information Theory 2022-12-26 v6 math.IT Statistics Theory Statistics Theory

Abstract

We prove that the ff-divergences between univariate Cauchy distributions are all symmetric, and can be expressed as strictly increasing scalar functions of the symmetric chi-squared divergence. We report the corresponding scalar functions for the total variation distance, the Kullback-Leibler divergence, the squared Hellinger divergence, and the Jensen-Shannon divergence among others. Next, we give conditions to expand the ff-divergences as converging infinite series of higher-order power chi divergences, and illustrate the criterion for converging Taylor series expressing the ff-divergences between Cauchy distributions. We then show that the symmetric property of ff-divergences holds for multivariate location-scale families with prescribed matrix scales provided that the standard density is even which includes the cases of the multivariate normal and Cauchy families. However, the ff-divergences between multivariate Cauchy densities with different scale matrices are shown asymmetric. Finally, we present several metrizations of ff-divergences between univariate Cauchy distributions and further report geometric embedding properties of the Kullback-Leibler divergence.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2101.12459,
  title  = {On $f$-divergences between Cauchy distributions},
  author = {Frank Nielsen and Kazuki Okamura},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.12459},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

64 pages, 1 figure, 1 table

R2 v1 2026-06-23T22:38:57.479Z