TENDE: Transfer Entropy Neural Diffusion Estimation

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Munoz, Simon Pedro Galeano, Bounoua, Mustapha, Franzese, Giulio, Michiardi, Pietro, Filippone, Maurizio
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Munoz, Simon Pedro Galeano
Bounoua, Mustapha
Franzese, Giulio
Michiardi, Pietro
Filippone, Maurizio
author_facet Munoz, Simon Pedro Galeano
Bounoua, Mustapha
Franzese, Giulio
Michiardi, Pietro
Filippone, Maurizio
contents Transfer entropy measures directed information flow in time series, and it has become a fundamental quantity in applications spanning neuroscience, finance, and complex systems analysis. However, existing estimation methods suffer from the curse of dimensionality, require restrictive distributional assumptions, or need exponentially large datasets for reliable convergence. We address these limitations in the literature by proposing TENDE (Transfer Entropy Neural Diffusion Estimation), a novel approach that leverages score-based diffusion models to estimate transfer entropy through conditional mutual information. By learning score functions of the relevant conditional distributions, TENDE provides flexible, scalable estimation while making minimal assumptions about the underlying data-generating process. We demonstrate superior accuracy and robustness compared to existing neural estimators and other state-of-the-art approaches across synthetic benchmarks and real data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_14096
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TENDE: Transfer Entropy Neural Diffusion Estimation
Munoz, Simon Pedro Galeano
Bounoua, Mustapha
Franzese, Giulio
Michiardi, Pietro
Filippone, Maurizio
Machine Learning
Transfer entropy measures directed information flow in time series, and it has become a fundamental quantity in applications spanning neuroscience, finance, and complex systems analysis. However, existing estimation methods suffer from the curse of dimensionality, require restrictive distributional assumptions, or need exponentially large datasets for reliable convergence. We address these limitations in the literature by proposing TENDE (Transfer Entropy Neural Diffusion Estimation), a novel approach that leverages score-based diffusion models to estimate transfer entropy through conditional mutual information. By learning score functions of the relevant conditional distributions, TENDE provides flexible, scalable estimation while making minimal assumptions about the underlying data-generating process. We demonstrate superior accuracy and robustness compared to existing neural estimators and other state-of-the-art approaches across synthetic benchmarks and real data.
title TENDE: Transfer Entropy Neural Diffusion Estimation
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14096