English

Shared Information for a Markov Chain on a Tree

Information Theory 2024-01-23 v2 math.IT

Abstract

Shared information is a measure of mutual dependence among multiple jointly distributed random variables with finite alphabets. For a Markov chain on a tree with a given joint distribution, we give a new proof of an explicit characterization of shared information. The Markov chain on a tree is shown to possess a global Markov property based on graph separation; this property plays a key role in our proofs. When the underlying joint distribution is not known, we exploit the special form of this characterization to provide a multiarmed bandit algorithm for estimating shared information, and analyze its error performance.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2307.15844,
  title  = {Shared Information for a Markov Chain on a Tree},
  author = {Sagnik Bhattacharya and Prakash Narayan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.15844},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

13 pages, 4 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:43:16.106Z