Ensemble Estimators for Multivariate Entropy Estimation

DOI10.1109/TIT.2013.2251456zbMATH Open1364.94254arXiv1203.5829OpenAlexW2005560667WikidataQ39755627 ScholiaQ39755627MaRDI QIDQ5346463FDOQ5346463

Authors: Kumar Sricharan, Dennis Wei, Alfred O. III Hero 

Publication date: 8 June 2017

Published in: IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: The problem of estimation of density functionals like entropy and mutual information has received much attention in the statistics and information theory communities. A large class of estimators of functionals of the probability density suffer from the curse of dimensionality, wherein the mean squared error (MSE) decays increasingly slowly as a function of the sample size $T$ as the dimension $d$ of the samples increases. In particular, the rate is often glacially slow of order $O(T^{-gamma/d})$, where $gamma>0$ is a rate parameter. Examples of such estimators include kernel density estimators, $k$-nearest neighbor ($k$-NN) density estimators, $k$-NN entropy estimators, intrinsic dimension estimators and other examples. In this paper, we propose a weighted affine combination of an ensemble of such estimators, where optimal weights can be chosen such that the weighted estimator converges at a much faster dimension invariant rate of $O(T^{-1})$. Furthermore, we show that these optimal weights can be determined by solving a convex optimization problem which can be performed offline and does not require training data. We illustrate the superior performance of our weighted estimator for two important applications: (i) estimating the Panter-Dite distortion-rate factor and (ii) estimating the Shannon entropy for testing the probability distribution of a random sample.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.5829

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Multivariate analysis (62H99) Measures of information, entropy (94A17)

Cited In (5)

• Entropy estimation via uniformization
• Efficient multivariate entropy estimation via \(k\)-nearest neighbour distances
• Statistical estimation of the Shannon entropy
• Divergence measures estimation and its asymptotic normality theory in the discrete case
• Statistical estimation of conditional Shannon entropy

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