2018

Formal Limitations on the Measurement of Mutual Information

McAllester, David, Stratos, Karl

Understand

Measuring mutual information from finite data is difficult.

  • Recent work has considered variational methods maximizing a lower bound.
  • In this paper, we prove that serious statistical limitations are inherent to any method of measuring mutual information.
  • More specifically, we show that any distribution-free high-confidence lower bound on mutual information estimated from N samples cannot be larger than O(ln N ).

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