Mutual information and the encoding of contingency tables

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Jerdee, Maximilian, Kirkley, Alec, Newman, M. E. J.
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Jerdee, Maximilian
Kirkley, Alec
Newman, M. E. J.
author_facet Jerdee, Maximilian
Kirkley, Alec
Newman, M. E. J.
contents Mutual information is commonly used as a measure of similarity between competing labelings of a given set of objects, for example to quantify performance in classification and community detection tasks. As argued recently, however, the mutual information as conventionally defined can return biased results because it neglects the information cost of the so-called contingency table, a crucial component of the similarity calculation. In principle the bias can be rectified by subtracting the appropriate information cost, leading to the modified measure known as the reduced mutual information, but in practice one can only ever compute an upper bound on this information cost, and the value of the reduced mutual information depends crucially on how good a bound is established. In this paper we describe an improved method for encoding contingency tables that gives a substantially better bound in typical use cases, and approaches the ideal value in the common case where the labelings are closely similar, as we demonstrate with extensive numerical results.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_05393
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mutual information and the encoding of contingency tables
Jerdee, Maximilian
Kirkley, Alec
Newman, M. E. J.
Social and Information Networks
Statistical Mechanics
Machine Learning
Mutual information is commonly used as a measure of similarity between competing labelings of a given set of objects, for example to quantify performance in classification and community detection tasks. As argued recently, however, the mutual information as conventionally defined can return biased results because it neglects the information cost of the so-called contingency table, a crucial component of the similarity calculation. In principle the bias can be rectified by subtracting the appropriate information cost, leading to the modified measure known as the reduced mutual information, but in practice one can only ever compute an upper bound on this information cost, and the value of the reduced mutual information depends crucially on how good a bound is established. In this paper we describe an improved method for encoding contingency tables that gives a substantially better bound in typical use cases, and approaches the ideal value in the common case where the labelings are closely similar, as we demonstrate with extensive numerical results.
title Mutual information and the encoding of contingency tables
topic Social and Information Networks
Statistical Mechanics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.05393