Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2105.11580

NPD Entropy: A Non-Parametric Differential Entropy Rate Estimator

Andrew Feutrill·Matthew Roughan
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

The estimation of entropy rates for stationary discrete-valued stochastic processes is a well studied problem in information theory. However, estimating the entropy rate for stationary continuous-valued stochastic processes has not received as much attention. In fact, many current techniques are not able to accurately estimate or characterise the complexity of the differential entropy rate for strongly correlated processes, such as Fractional Gaussian Noise and ARFIMA(0,d,0). To the point that some cannot even detect the trend of the entropy rate, e.g. when it increases/decreases, maximum, or asymptotic trends, as a function of their Hurst parameter. However, a recently developed technique provides accurate estimates at a high computational cost. In this paper, we define a robust technique for non-parametrically estimating the differential entropy rate of a continuous valued stochastic process from observed data, by making an explicit link between the differential entropy rate and the Shannon entropy rate of a quantised version of the original data. Estimation is performed by a Shannon entropy rate estimator, and then converted to a differential entropy rate estimate. We show that this technique inherits many important statistical properties from the Shannon entropy rate estimator. The estimator is able to provide better estimates than the defined relative measures and much quicker estimates than known absolute measures, for strongly correlated processes. Finally, we analyse the complexity of the estimation technique and test the robustness to non-stationarity, and show that none of the current techniques are robust to non-stationarity, even if they are robust to strong correlations.

Explore related subjects

cs.ITmath.ITmath.STstat.TH

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Andrew Feutrill, Matthew Roughan. 2021-05-24. NPD Entropy: A Non-Parametric Differential Entropy Rate Estimator. https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.11580

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Radiance-Field Guided Pretraining: Scaling Localization Models with Unlabeled Wireless Signals

Radio frequency (RF)-based indoor localization offers significant promise for applications such as indoor navigation, augmented reality, and pervasive computing. While deep learning has greatly enhanced localization accuracy and robustness, existing localization models still face major challenges in cross-scene generalization due to their reliance on scene-specific labeled data. To address this, we introduce Radiance-Field Reinforced Pretraining (RFRP). This novel self-supervised pretraining framework couples a large localization model (LM) with a neural radio-frequency radiance field (RF-NeRF) in an asymmetrical autoencoder architecture. In this design, the LM encodes received RF spectra into latent, position-relevant representations, while the RF-NeRF decodes them to reconstruct the original spectra. This alignment between input and output enables effective representation learning using large-scale, unlabeled RF data, which can be collected continuously with minimal effort. To this end, we collected RF samples at 7,327,321 positions across 100 diverse scenes using four common wireless technologies--RFID, BLE, WiFi, and IIoT. Data from 75 scenes were used for training, and the remaining 25 for evaluation. Experimental results show that the RFRP-pretrained LM reduces localization error by over 40% compared to non-pretrained models and by 21% compared to those pretrained using supervised learning.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2026

Uniform Recovery of Structured Signals from Nonlinear Observations: Improved Error Rates

Consider the recovery of structured signals from nonlinear observations. Under Gaussian matrix and a large class of unknown nonlinear link functions, Plan and Vershynin (2016) showed that generalized Lasso achieves accurate nonuniform recovery of a fixed signal. More recently, Genzel and Stollenwerk (2023) showed that generalized Lasso is indeed capable of accurately recovering all structured signals. However, in some canonical settings with discontinuous link functions, their uniform recovery error rate is essentially slower than the nonuniform one. Specifically, in the recovery of $n$-dimensional $k$-sparse vectors from $m$ measurements, generalized Lasso with a perfectly tuned $\ell_1$ constraint achieves nonuniform error rate $ O(\sqrt{k\log(en/k)/m})$, while the uniform error rate of Genzel and Stollenwerk is no faster than $O((k\log(en/k)/m)^{1/4})$. In this paper, we narrow this gap by establishing improved uniform recovery guarantees under piecewise Lipschitz link functions with well-separated jump discontinuities. We analyze a projected gradient descent (PGD) algorithm whose projection can be onto a convex set or a cone, and our results for the PGD with a convex set are also valid for the generalized Lasso. In sparse recovery, the improved uniform error rates match the nonuniform rate $O(\sqrt{k\log(en/k)/m})$ up to logarithmic factors. Under the sign link function, we further show that iterative hard thresholding (a specific instance of the PGD) achieves uniform recovery error rate $O(\sqrt{k\log(en/k)/m})$, matching the nonuniform rate up to a universal constant. Technically, the uniform guarantees for the PGD are obtained by showing that the gradient maps satisfy the restricted approximate invertibility condition uniformly over all signals. We demonstrate that this is a general approach to uniform recovery under nonlinear observations.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2026

Recursive overlap Bernoulli distributions and an entropy concavity conjecture

We introduce a family of recursively generated finite probability distributions obtained from left and right embeddings with overlaps. The construction interpolates between the classical binomial distribution and the non-overlapping Bernoulli product distribution. We derive explicit formulas for the expectation, variance, and the generating function of higher moments, and formulate a conjecture asserting that the Shannon entropy is concave. The conjecture is proved in the two extremal cases and supported by symbolic computations for numerous overlap sequences.

cs.IT↗