The identification of relevant features, i.e., the driving variables that determine a process or the properties of a system, is an essential part of the analysis of data sets with a large number of variables. A mathematical rigorous approach to quantifying the relevance of these features is mutual information. Mutual information determines the relevance of features in terms of their joint mutual dependence to the property of interest. However, mutual information requires as input probability distributions, which cannot be reliably estimated from continuous distributions such as physical quantities like lengths or energies. Here, we introduce total cumulative mutual information (TCMI), a measure of the relevance of mutual dependences that extends mutual information to random variables of continuous distribution based on cumulative probability distributions. TCMI is a non-parametric, robust, and deterministic measure that facilitates comparisons and rankings between feature sets with different cardinality. The ranking induced by TCMI allows for feature selection, i.e., the identification of variable sets that are nonlinear statistically related to a property of interest, taking into account the number of data samples as well as the cardinality of the set of variables. We evaluate the performance of our measure with simulated data, compare its performance with similar multivariate-dependence measures, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our feature-selection method on a set of standard data sets and a typical scenario in materials science.
This paper proposes a geometric estimator of dependency between a pair of multivariate samples. The proposed estimator of dependency is based on a randomly permuted geometric graph (the minimal spanning tree) over the two multivariate samples. This estimator converges to a quantity that we call the geometric mutual information (GMI), which is equivalent to the Henze-Penrose divergence [1] between the joint distribution of the multivariate samples and the product of the marginals. The GMI has many of the same properties as standard MI but can be estimated from empirical data without density est…
University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；University of Miami（迈阿密大学）；UiT - The Arctic University of Norway（UiT-挪威北极大学）
The matrix-based Renyi's α-order entropy functional was recently introduced using the normalized eigenspectrum of a Hermitian matrix of the projected data in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). However, the current theory in the matrix-based Renyi's α-order entropy functional only defines the entropy of a single variable or mutual information between two random variables. In information theory and machine learning communities, one is also frequently interested in multivariate information quantities, such as the multivariate joint entropy and different interactive quantities among multip…
Yale University（耶鲁大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
Information theoretic measures (e.g. the Kullback Liebler divergence and Shannon mutual information) have been used for exploring possibly nonlinear multivariate dependencies in high dimension. If these dependencies are assumed to follow a Markov factor graph model, this exploration process is called structure discovery. For discrete-valued samples, estimates of the information divergence over the parametric class of multinomial models lead to structure discovery methods whose mean squared error achieves parametric convergence rates as the sample size grows. However, a naive application of thi…
We propose three measures of mutual dependence between multiple random vectors. All the measures are zero if and only if the random vectors are mutually independent. The first measure generalizes distance covariance from pairwise dependence to mutual dependence, while the other two measures are sums of squared distance covariance. All the measures share similar properties and asymptotic distributions to distance covariance, and capture non-linear and non-monotone mutual dependence between the random vectors. Inspired by complete and incomplete V-statistics, we define the empirical measures and…
We derive fundamental sample complexity bounds for recovering sparse and structured signals for linear and nonlinear observation models including sparse regression, group testing, multivariate regression and problems with missing features. In general, sparse signal processing problems can be characterized in terms of the following Markovian property. We are given a set of $N$ variables $X_1,X_2,\ldots,X_N$, and there is an unknown subset of variables $S \subset \{1,\ldots,N\}$ that are relevant for predicting outcomes $Y$. More specifically, when $Y$ is conditioned on $\{X_n\}_{n\in S}$ it is …
Williams and Beer (2010) proposed a nonnegative mutual information decomposition, based on the construction of redundancy lattices, which allows separating the information that a set of variables contains about a target variable into nonnegative components interpretable as the unique information of some variables not provided by others as well as redundant and synergistic components. However, the definition of multivariate measures of redundancy that comply with nonnegativity and conform to certain axioms that capture conceptually desirable properties of redundancy has proven to be elusive. We…
Feature selection and reducing the dimensionality of data is an essential step in data analysis. In this work, we propose a new criterion for feature selection that is formulated as conditional information between features given the labeled variable. Instead of using the standard mutual information measure based on Kullback-Leibler divergence, we use our proposed criterion to filter out redundant features for the purpose of multiclass classification. This approach results in an efficient and fast non-parametric implementation of feature selection as it can be directly estimated using a geometr…
While it is an important problem to identify the existence of causal associations between two components of a multivariate time series, a topic addressed in Runge et al. (2012), it is even more important to assess the strength of their association in a meaningful way. In the present article we focus on the problem of defining a meaningful coupling strength using information theoretic measures and demonstrate the short-comings of the well-known mutual information and transfer entropy. Instead, we propose a certain time-delayed conditional mutual information, the momentary information transfer (…
We study the problem of community detection when there is covariate information about the node labels and one observes multiple correlated networks. We provide an asymptotic upper bound on the per-node mutual information as well as a heuristic analysis of a multivariate performance measure called the MMSE matrix. These results show that the combined effects of seemingly very different types of information can be characterized explicitly in terms of formulas involving low-dimensional estimation problems in additive Gaussian noise. Our analysis is supported by numerical simulations.
HIIT / Department of Computer Science University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学计算机科学系 / 赫尔辛基信息技术研究所）
We propose a method for learning Markov network structures for continuous data without invoking any assumptions about the distribution of the variables. The method makes use of previous work on a non-parametric estimator for mutual information which is used to create a non-parametric test for multivariate conditional independence. This independence test is then combined with an efficient constraint-based algorithm for learning the graph structure. The performance of the method is evaluated on several synthetic data sets and it is shown to learn considerably more accurate structures than compet…
Beyond Normal: On the Evaluation of Mutual Information Estimators
ETH AI Center, ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院ETH人工智能中心）；Institute of Fundamental Technological Research, Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院基础技术研究所）；Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院计算机科学系）；SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics（SIB瑞士生物信息学研究所）；Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院生物系统科学与工程系）
On the Properties and Estimation of Pointwise Mutual Information Profiles
ETH AI Center, ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院ETH AI中心）；Institute of Fundamental Technological Research, Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院基础技术研究所）；SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics（瑞士SIB生物信息学研究所）；Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院生物系统科学与工程系）；Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院计算机科学系）
本文解析多元正态分布的点互信息轮廓，提出Bend and Mix模型族，用蒙特卡洛方法估计轮廓，并用于研究互信息估计器局限、神经评判器行为及异常值影响，最终实现基于模型的贝叶斯互信息估计。
This article describes the R package varrank. It has a flexible implementation of heuristic approaches which perform variable ranking based on mutual information. The package is particularly suitable for exploring multivariate datasets requiring a holistic analysis. The core functionality is a general implementation of the minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMRe) model. This approach is based on information theory metrics. It is compatible with discrete and continuous data which are discretised using a large choice of possible rules. The two main problems that can be addressed by this pack…
We propose a test of independence of two multivariate random vectors, given a sample from the underlying population. Our approach, which we call MINT, is based on the estimation of mutual information, whose decomposition into joint and marginal entropies facilitates the use of recently-developed efficient entropy estimators derived from nearest neighbour distances. The proposed critical values, which may be obtained from simulation (in the case where one marginal is known) or resampling, guarantee that the test has nominal size, and we provide local power analyses, uniformly over classes of de…
CIRAD（法国农业研究与国际合作组织）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Univ. Grenoble Alpes（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学）；Laboratoire Jean Kuntzmann（让·库茨曼实验室）
Multivariate count data are defined as the number of items of different categories issued from sampling within a population, which individuals are grouped into categories. The analysis of multivariate count data is a recurrent and crucial issue in numerous modelling problems, particularly in the fields of biology and ecology (where the data can represent, for example, children counts associated with multitype branching processes), sociology and econometrics. We focus on I) Identifying categories that appear simultaneously, or on the contrary that are mutually exclusive. This is achieved by ide…
Multivariate pattern analyses approaches in neuroimaging are fundamentally concerned with investigating the quantity and type of information processed by various regions of the human brain; typically, estimates of classification accuracy are used to quantify information. While a extensive and powerful library of methods can be applied to train and assess classifiers, it is not always clear how to use the resulting measures of classification performance to draw scientific conclusions: e.g. for the purpose of evaluating redundancy between brain regions. An additional confound for interpreting cl…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Purdue University（普渡大学）
A broad range of cross-$m$-domain generation researches boil down to matching a joint distribution by deep generative models (DGMs). Hitherto algorithms excel in pairwise domains while as $m$ increases, remain struggling to scale themselves to fit a joint distribution. In this paper, we propose a domain-scalable DGM, i.e., MMI-ALI for $m$-domain joint distribution matching. As an $m$-domain ensemble model of ALIs \cite{dumoulin2016adversarially}, MMI-ALI is adversarially trained with maximizing Multivariate Mutual Information (MMI) w.r.t. joint variables of each pair of domains and their share…
Universitat de València（瓦伦西亚大学）；University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）
Density destructors are differentiable and invertible transforms that map multivariate PDFs of arbitrary structure (low entropy) into non-structured PDFs (maximum entropy). Multivariate Gaussianization and multivariate equalization are specific examples of this family, which break down the complexity of the original PDF through a set of elementary transforms that progressively remove the structure of the data. We demonstrate how this property of density destructive flows is connected to classical information theory, and how density destructors can be used to get more accurate estimates of info…
A Multivariate Bernoulli-Based Sampling Method for Multi-Label Data with Application to Meta-Research
Department of Biostatistics, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences（生物统计学系，亚拉巴马州医学科学大学）；Arkansas Children’s Research Institute（亚拉巴马州儿童研究研究所）；Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington（流行病学与生物统计学系，印第安纳大学公共健康学院-布卢明顿分校）；Department of Psychology, Emory University（心理学系，埃默里大学）
针对多标签数据中标签频率差异大且存在依赖关系的问题，提出一种基于多元伯努利分布的加权采样算法，通过估计标签组合权重实现目标分布特征，并在Web of Science研究文章数据上验证了其增强少数类别代表性的效果。
We study the problem of using i.i.d. samples from an unknown multivariate probability distribution $p$ to estimate the mutual information of $p$. This problem has recently received attention in two settings: (1) where $p$ is assumed to be Gaussian and (2) where $p$ is assumed only to lie in a large nonparametric smoothness class. Estimators proposed for the Gaussian case converge in high dimensions when the Gaussian assumption holds, but are brittle, failing dramatically when $p$ is not Gaussian. Estimators proposed for the nonparametric case fail to converge with realistic sample sizes except…
One of the most fundamental questions one can ask about a pair of random variables X and Y is the value of their mutual information. Unfortunately, this task is often stymied by the extremely large dimension of the variables. We might hope to replace each variable by a lower-dimensional representation that preserves the relationship with the other variable. The theoretically ideal implementation is the use of minimal sufficient statistics, where it is well-known that either X or Y can be replaced by their minimal sufficient statistic about the other while preserving the mutual information. Whi…
Datasets with hundreds of variables and many missing values are commonplace. In this setting, it is both statistically and computationally challenging to detect true predictive relationships between variables and also to suppress false positives. This paper proposes an approach that combines probabilistic programming, information theory, and non-parametric Bayes. It shows how to use Bayesian non-parametric modeling to (i) build an ensemble of joint probability models for all the variables; (ii) efficiently detect marginal independencies; and (iii) estimate the conditional mutual information be…
Automated extraction of mutual independence patterns using Bayesian comparison of partition models
Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；INSERM（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；Centre de recherches et d’études en sciences des interactions (CRÉSI) — Center for Interaction Science (CIS)（互动科学研究中心（CRÉSI / CIS））
Estimating entropy and mutual information consistently is important for many machine learning applications. The Kozachenko-Leonenko (KL) estimator (Kozachenko & Leonenko, 1987) is a widely used nonparametric estimator for the entropy of multivariate continuous random variables, as well as the basis of the mutual information estimator of Kraskov et al. (2004), perhaps the most widely used estimator of mutual information in this setting. Despite the practical importance of these estimators, major theoretical questions regarding their finite-sample behavior remain open. This paper proves finite-s…
Department of Computational Neuroscience, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg University（汉堡大学附属埃彭多夫医学中心计算神经科学系，汉堡大学）
The use of mutual information as a similarity measure in agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC) raises an important issue: some correction needs to be applied for the dimensionality of variables. In this work, we formulate the decision of merging dependent multivariate normal variables in an AHC procedure as a Bayesian model comparison. We found that the Bayesian formulation naturally shrinks the empirical covariance matrix towards a matrix set a priori (e.g., the identity), provides an automated stopping rule, and corrects for dimensionality using a term that scales up the measure as a f…
Computational NeuroEngineering Laboratory（计算神经工程实验室）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）
Feature selection aims to select the smallest feature subset that yields the minimum generalization error. In the rich literature in feature selection, information theory-based approaches seek a subset of features such that the mutual information between the selected features and the class labels is maximized. Despite the simplicity of this objective, there still remain several open problems in optimization. These include, for example, the automatic determination of the optimal subset size (i.e., the number of features) or a stopping criterion if the greedy searching strategy is adopted. In th…
In this paper, we propose a mixture of probabilistic partial canonical correlation analysis (MPPCCA) that extracts the Causal Patterns from two multivariate time series. Causal patterns refer to the signal patterns within interactions of two elements having multiple types of mutually causal relationships, rather than a mixture of simultaneous correlations or the absence of presence of a causal relationship between the elements. In multivariate statistics, partial canonical correlation analysis (PCCA) evaluates the correlation between two multivariates after subtracting the effect of the third …
Information Sciences Institute（信息科学研究所）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
We introduce a method to learn a hierarchy of successively more abstract representations of complex data based on optimizing an information-theoretic objective. Intuitively, the optimization searches for a set of latent factors that best explain the correlations in the data as measured by multivariate mutual information. The method is unsupervised, requires no model assumptions, and scales linearly with the number of variables which makes it an attractive approach for very high dimensional systems. We demonstrate that Correlation Explanation (CorEx) automatically discovers meaningful structure…
Learning by children and animals occurs effortlessly and largely without obvious supervision. Successes in automating supervised learning have not translated to the more ambiguous realm of unsupervised learning where goals and labels are not provided. Barlow (1961) suggested that the signal that brains leverage for unsupervised learning is dependence, or redundancy, in the sensory environment. Dependence can be characterized using the information-theoretic multivariate mutual information measure called total correlation. The principle of Total Cor-relation Ex-planation (CorEx) is to learn repr…
