Estimation of information-theoretic quantities and discrete distributions

A basic problem in coding theory is to estimate the mutual information between two random variables, given limited samples (e.g., how much information does a given visual cell carry about the pattern of light on the retina?).

Paninski, L. (2003). Estimation of entropy and mutual information. Neural Computation 15: 1191-1254. Matlab code for entropy estimation (implementing the method described here) is available here. Code for computing the exact bias and a useful bound on the variance of a large class of entropy estimators, for any discrete probability distribution, here.

Paninski, L. (2004). Estimating entropy on m bins given fewer than m samples. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 50: 2200-2203.

Paninski, L. & Yajima, M. (2008). Undersmoothed kernel entropy estimators. In press, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.



It is interesting to note that similar ideas may be used to analyze the problem of directly estimating the underlying discrete distribution (instead of its entropy).

Paninski (2004). Variational minimax estimation of discrete distributions under Kullback-Leibler loss. NIPS 17.

Paninski, L. (2008). A coincidence-based test for uniformity given very sparsely-sampled discrete data. In press, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.


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