Finite Sample Based Mutual Information

Autor: Khairan Rajab, Firuz Kamalov
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
Zdroj: IEEE Access, Vol 9, Pp 118871-118879 (2021)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2169-3536
DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3107031
Popis: Mutual information is a popular metric in machine learning. In case of a discrete target variable and a continuous feature variable the mutual information can be calculated as a sum-integral of weighted log likelihood ratio of joint and marginal density distributions. However, in practice the true density distributions are unavailable and only a finite sample of the population is given. In this paper, we propose a novel method for calculating the mutual information for continuous variables using a finite sample of the population. The proposed method is based on approximating the underlying continuous density distribution using Kernel Density Estimation. Unlike previous kernel-based approaches for estimating mutual information, our method calculates directly the integral involved in the formula. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed method produces more accurate results than the currently used feature selection approaches. In addition, our method demonstrates substantially faster computation times than the benchmark methods.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals