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probability theory Probability theory is the branch of mathematics concerned with probability. Although there are several different probability interpretations, probability theory treats the concept in a rigorous mathematical manner by expressing it through a set o ...
and
information theory Information theory is the scientific study of the quantification (science), quantification, computer data storage, storage, and telecommunication, communication of information. The field was originally established by the works of Harry Nyquist a ...
, the mutual information (MI) of two
random variable A random variable (also called random quantity, aleatory variable, or stochastic variable) is a mathematical formalization of a quantity or object which depends on random events. It is a mapping or a function from possible outcomes (e.g., the po ...
s is a measure of the mutual dependence between the two variables. More specifically, it quantifies the " amount of information" (in units such as shannons (
bit The bit is the most basic unit of information in computing and digital communications. The name is a portmanteau of binary digit. The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values. These values are most commonly represented a ...
s), nats or hartleys) obtained about one random variable by observing the other random variable. The concept of mutual information is intimately linked to that of entropy of a random variable, a fundamental notion in information theory that quantifies the expected "amount of information" held in a random variable. Not limited to real-valued random variables and linear dependence like the correlation coefficient, MI is more general and determines how different the joint distribution of the pair (X,Y) is from the product of the marginal distributions of X and Y. MI is the
expected value In probability theory, the expected value (also called expectation, expectancy, mathematical expectation, mean, average, or first moment) is a generalization of the weighted average. Informally, the expected value is the arithmetic mean of a ...
of the pointwise mutual information (PMI). The quantity was defined and analyzed by
Claude Shannon Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer known as a "father of information theory". As a 21-year-old master's degree student at the Massachusetts In ...
in his landmark paper " A Mathematical Theory of Communication", although he did not call it "mutual information". This term was coined later by Robert Fano. Mutual Information is also known as information gain.


Definition

Let (X,Y) be a pair of random variables with values over the space \mathcal\times\mathcal. If their joint distribution is P_ and the marginal distributions are P_X and P_Y, the mutual information is defined as where D_ is the Kullback–Leibler divergence. Notice, as per property of the Kullback–Leibler divergence, that I(X;Y) is equal to zero precisely when the joint distribution coincides with the product of the marginals, i.e. when X and Y are independent (and hence observing Y tells you nothing about X). I(X;Y) is non-negative, it is a measure of the price for encoding (X,Y) as a pair of independent random variables, when in reality they are not. If the
natural logarithm The natural logarithm of a number is its logarithm to the base of the mathematical constant , which is an irrational and transcendental number approximately equal to . The natural logarithm of is generally written as , , or sometimes, if ...
is used, the unit of mutual information is the
nat Nat or NAT may refer to: Computing * Network address translation (NAT), in computer networking Organizations * National Actors Theatre, New York City, U.S. * National AIDS trust, a British charity * National Archives of Thailand * National ...
. If the log base 2 is used, the unit of mutual information is the shannon, also known as the bit. If the log base 10 is used, the unit of mutual information is the
hartley Hartley may refer to: Places Australia *Hartley, New South Wales *Hartley, South Australia **Electoral district of Hartley, a state electoral district Canada *Hartley Bay, British Columbia United Kingdom *Hartley, Cumbria *Hartley, Plymou ...
, also known as the ban or the dit.


In terms of PMFs for discrete distributions

The mutual information of two jointly discrete random variables X and Y is calculated as a double sum: where P_ is the joint probability ''mass'' function of X and Y, and P_X and P_Y are the marginal probability mass functions of X and Y respectively.


In terms of PDFs for continuous distributions

In the case of jointly continuous random variables, the double sum is replaced by a double integral: where P_ is now the joint probability ''density'' function of X and Y, and P_X and P_Y are the marginal probability density functions of X and Y respectively.


Motivation

Intuitively, mutual information measures the information that X and Y share: It measures how much knowing one of these variables reduces uncertainty about the other. For example, if X and Y are independent, then knowing X does not give any information about Y and vice versa, so their mutual information is zero. At the other extreme, if X is a deterministic function of Y and Y is a deterministic function of X then all information conveyed by X is shared with Y: knowing X determines the value of Y and vice versa. As a result, in this case the mutual information is the same as the uncertainty contained in Y (or X) alone, namely the entropy of Y (or X). Moreover, this mutual information is the same as the entropy of X and as the entropy of Y. (A very special case of this is when X and Y are the same random variable.) Mutual information is a measure of the inherent dependence expressed in the joint distribution of X and Y relative to the marginal distribution of X and Y under the assumption of independence. Mutual information therefore measures dependence in the following sense: \operatorname(X;Y) = 0 if and only if X and Y are independent random variables. This is easy to see in one direction: if X and Y are independent, then p_(x,y)=p_X(x) \cdot p_Y(y), and therefore: : \log = \log 1 = 0 . Moreover, mutual information is nonnegative (i.e. \operatorname(X;Y) \ge 0 see below) and symmetric (i.e. \operatorname(X;Y) = \operatorname(Y;X) see below).


Properties


Nonnegativity

Using
Jensen's inequality In mathematics, Jensen's inequality, named after the Danish mathematician Johan Jensen, relates the value of a convex function of an integral to the integral of the convex function. It was proved by Jensen in 1906, building on an earlier pr ...
on the definition of mutual information we can show that \operatorname(X;Y) is non-negative, i.e. :\operatorname(X;Y) \ge 0


Symmetry

:\operatorname(X;Y) = \operatorname(Y;X) The proof is given considering the relationship with entropy, as shown below.


Relation to conditional and joint entropy

Mutual information can be equivalently expressed as: :\begin \operatorname(X;Y) & \equiv \Eta(X) - \Eta(X\mid Y) \\ & \equiv \Eta(Y) - \Eta(Y\mid X) \\ & \equiv \Eta(X) + \Eta(Y) - \Eta(X, Y) \\ & \equiv \Eta(X, Y) - \Eta(X\mid Y) - \Eta(Y\mid X) \end where \Eta(X) and \Eta(Y) are the marginal entropies, \Eta(X\mid Y) and \Eta(Y\mid X) are the conditional entropies, and \Eta(X,Y) is the joint entropy of X and Y. Notice the analogy to the union, difference, and intersection of two sets: in this respect, all the formulas given above are apparent from the Venn diagram reported at the beginning of the article. In terms of a communication channel in which the output Y is a noisy version of the input X, these relations are summarised in the figure: Because \operatorname(X;Y) is non-negative, consequently, \Eta(X) \ge \Eta(X\mid Y). Here we give the detailed deduction of \operatorname(X;Y)=\Eta(Y)-\Eta(Y\mid X) for the case of jointly discrete random variables: : \begin \operatorname(X;Y) & = \sum_ p_(x,y) \log \frac\\ & = \sum_ p_(x,y) \log \frac - \sum_ p_(x,y) \log p_Y(y) \\ & = \sum_ p_X(x)p_(y) \log p_(y) - \sum_ p_(x,y) \log p_Y(y) \\ & = \sum_ p_X(x) \left(\sum_ p_(y) \log p_(y)\right) - \sum_ \left(\sum_ p_(x,y)\right) \log p_Y(y) \\ & = -\sum_ p_X(x) \Eta(Y\mid X=x) - \sum_ p_Y(y) \log p_Y(y) \\ & = -\Eta(Y\mid X) + \Eta(Y) \\ & = \Eta(Y) - \Eta(Y\mid X). \\ \end The proofs of the other identities above are similar. The proof of the general case (not just discrete) is similar, with integrals replacing sums. Intuitively, if entropy \Eta(Y) is regarded as a measure of uncertainty about a random variable, then \Eta(Y\mid X) is a measure of what X does ''not'' say about Y. This is "the amount of uncertainty remaining about Y after X is known", and thus the right side of the second of these equalities can be read as "the amount of uncertainty in Y, minus the amount of uncertainty in Y which remains after X is known", which is equivalent to "the amount of uncertainty in Y which is removed by knowing X". This corroborates the intuitive meaning of mutual information as the amount of information (that is, reduction in uncertainty) that knowing either variable provides about the other. Note that in the discrete case \Eta(Y\mid Y) = 0 and therefore \Eta(Y) = \operatorname(Y;Y). Thus \operatorname(Y; Y) \ge \operatorname(X; Y), and one can formulate the basic principle that a variable contains at least as much information about itself as any other variable can provide.


Relation to Kullback–Leibler divergence

For jointly discrete or jointly continuous pairs (X,Y), mutual information is the Kullback–Leibler divergence from the product of the
marginal distribution In probability theory and statistics, the marginal distribution of a subset of a collection of random variables is the probability distribution of the variables contained in the subset. It gives the probabilities of various values of the variables ...
s, p_X \cdot p_Y, of the joint distribution p_, that is, Furthermore, let p_(x,y) =p_(x)* p_Y(y) be the conditional mass or density function. Then, we have the identity The proof for jointly discrete random variables is as follows: : \begin \operatorname(X; Y) &= \sum_ \sum_ \\ &= \sum_ \sum_ p_(x) p_Y(y) \log \frac \\ &= \sum_ p_Y(y) \sum_ p_(x) \log \frac \\ &= \sum_ p_Y(y) \; D_\text\!\left(p_ \parallel p_X\right) \\ &= \mathbb_Y \left _\text\!\left(p_ \parallel p_X\right)\right \end Similarly this identity can be established for jointly continuous random variables. Note that here the Kullback–Leibler divergence involves integration over the values of the random variable X only, and the expression D_\text(p_ \parallel p_X) still denotes a random variable because Y is random. Thus mutual information can also be understood as the
expectation Expectation or Expectations may refer to: Science * Expectation (epistemic) * Expected value, in mathematical probability theory * Expectation value (quantum mechanics) * Expectation–maximization algorithm, in statistics Music * ''Expectation' ...
of the Kullback–Leibler divergence of the univariate distribution p_X of X from the conditional distribution p_ of X given Y: the more different the distributions p_ and p_X are on average, the greater the information gain.


Bayesian estimation of mutual information

If samples from a joint distribution are available, a Bayesian approach can be used to estimate the mutual information of that distribution. The first work to do this, which also showed how to do Bayesian estimation of many other information-theoretic properties besides mutual information, was. Subsequent researchers have rederived and extended this analysis. See for a recent paper based on a prior specifically tailored to estimation of mutual information per se. Besides, recently an estimation method accounting for continuous and multivariate outputs, Y, was proposed in .


Independence assumptions

The Kullback-Leibler divergence formulation of the mutual information is predicated on that one is interested in comparing p(x,y) to the fully factorized
outer product In linear algebra, the outer product of two coordinate vector In linear algebra, a coordinate vector is a representation of a vector as an ordered list of numbers (a tuple) that describes the vector in terms of a particular ordered basis. An ea ...
p(x) \cdot p(y). In many problems, such as non-negative matrix factorization, one is interested in less extreme factorizations; specifically, one wishes to compare p(x,y) to a low-rank matrix approximation in some unknown variable w; that is, to what degree one might have : p(x,y)\approx \sum_w p^\prime (x,w) p^(w,y) Alternately, one might be interested in knowing how much more information p(x,y) carries over its factorization. In such a case, the excess information that the full distribution p(x,y) carries over the matrix factorization is given by the Kullback-Leibler divergence :\operatorname_ = \sum_ \sum_ , The conventional definition of the mutual information is recovered in the extreme case that the process W has only one value for w.


Variations

Several variations on mutual information have been proposed to suit various needs. Among these are normalized variants and generalizations to more than two variables.


Metric

Many applications require a metric, that is, a distance measure between pairs of points. The quantity :\begin d(X,Y) &= \Eta(X,Y) - \operatorname(X;Y) \\ &= \Eta(X) + \Eta(Y) - 2\operatorname(X;Y) \\ &= \Eta(X\mid Y) + \Eta(Y\mid X) \\ &= 2\Eta(X,Y) - \Eta(X) - \Eta(Y) \end satisfies the properties of a metric ( triangle inequality, non-negativity, indiscernability and symmetry). This distance metric is also known as the
variation of information In probability theory and information theory, the variation of information or shared information distance is a measure of the distance between two clusterings ( partitions of elements). It is closely related to mutual information; indeed, it is a ...
. If X, Y are discrete random variables then all the entropy terms are non-negative, so 0 \le d(X,Y) \le \Eta(X,Y) and one can define a normalized distance :D(X,Y) = \frac \le 1. The metric D is a universal metric, in that if any other distance measure places X and Y close by, then the D will also judge them close. Plugging in the definitions shows that :D(X,Y) = 1 - \frac. This is known as the Rajski Distance. In a set-theoretic interpretation of information (see the figure for Conditional entropy), this is effectively the
Jaccard distance The Jaccard index, also known as the Jaccard similarity coefficient, is a statistic used for gauging the Similarity measure, similarity and diversity index, diversity of Sample (statistics), sample sets. It was developed by Grove Karl Gilbert i ...
between X and Y. Finally, :D^\prime(X, Y) = 1 - \frac is also a metric.


Conditional mutual information

Sometimes it is useful to express the mutual information of two random variables conditioned on a third. For jointly discrete random variables this takes the form : \operatorname(X;Y, Z) = \sum_ \sum_ \sum_ , which can be simplified as : \operatorname(X;Y, Z) = \sum_ \sum_ \sum_ p_(x,y,z) \log \frac. For jointly continuous random variables this takes the form : \operatorname(X;Y, Z) = \int_ \int_ \int_ dx dy dz, which can be simplified as : \operatorname(X;Y, Z) = \int_ \int_ \int_ p_(x,y,z) \log \frac dx dy dz. Conditioning on a third random variable may either increase or decrease the mutual information, but it is always true that :\operatorname(X;Y, Z) \ge 0 for discrete, jointly distributed random variables X,Y,Z. This result has been used as a basic building block for proving other inequalities in information theory.


Interaction information

Several generalizations of mutual information to more than two random variables have been proposed, such as total correlation (or multi-information) and dual total correlation. The expression and study of multivariate higher-degree mutual information was achieved in two seemingly independent works: McGill (1954) who called these functions "interaction information", and Hu Kuo Ting (1962). Interaction information is defined for one variable as follows: :\operatorname(X_1) = \Eta(X_1) and for n > 1, : \operatorname(X_1;\,...\,;X_n) = \operatorname(X_1;\,...\,;X_) - \operatorname(X_1;\,...\,;X_\mid X_n). Some authors reverse the order of the terms on the right-hand side of the preceding equation, which changes the sign when the number of random variables is odd. (And in this case, the single-variable expression becomes the negative of the entropy.) Note that : I(X_1;\ldots;X_\mid X_) = \mathbb_ P_ \otimes\cdots\otimes P_ )


Multivariate statistical independence

The multivariate mutual information functions generalize the pairwise independence case that states that X_1, X_2 if and only if I(X_1; X_2) = 0, to arbitrary numerous variable. n variables are mutually independent if and only if the 2^n - n - 1 mutual information functions vanish I(X_1; \ldots; X_k) = 0 with n \ge k \ge 2 (theorem 2). In this sense, the I(X_1; \ldots; X_k) = 0 can be used as a refined statistical independence criterion.


Applications

For 3 variables, Brenner et al. applied multivariate mutual information to neural coding and called its negativity "synergy" and Watkinson et al. applied it to genetic expression. For arbitrary k variables, Tapia et al. applied multivariate mutual information to gene expression. It can be zero, positive, or negative. The positivity corresponds to relations generalizing the pairwise correlations, nullity corresponds to a refined notion of independence, and negativity detects high dimensional "emergent" relations and clusterized datapoints ). One high-dimensional generalization scheme which maximizes the mutual information between the joint distribution and other target variables is found to be useful in feature selection. Mutual information is also used in the area of signal processing as a measure of similarity between two signals. For example, FMI metric is an image fusion performance measure that makes use of mutual information in order to measure the amount of information that the fused image contains about the source images. The Matlab code for this metric can be found at. A python package for computing all multivariate mutual informations, conditional mutual information, joint entropies, total correlations, information distance in a dataset of n variables is available.


Directed information

Directed information, \operatorname\left(X^n \to Y^n\right), measures the amount of information that flows from the process X^n to Y^n, where X^n denotes the vector X_1, X_2, ..., X_n and Y^n denotes Y_1, Y_2, ..., Y_n. The term ''directed information'' was coined by James Massey and is defined as : \operatorname\left(X^n \to Y^n\right) = \sum_^n \operatorname\left(X^i; Y_i\mid Y^\right) . Note that if n=1, the directed information becomes the mutual information. Directed information has many applications in problems where causality plays an important role, such as capacity of channel with feedback.


Normalized variants

Normalized variants of the mutual information are provided by the ''coefficients of constraint'', uncertainty coefficient or proficiency: : C_ = \frac ~~~~\mbox~~~~ C_ = \frac. The two coefficients have a value ranging in , 1 but are not necessarily equal. In some cases a symmetric measure may be desired, such as the following '' redundancy'' measure: :R = \frac which attains a minimum of zero when the variables are independent and a maximum value of :R_\max = \frac when one variable becomes completely redundant with the knowledge of the other. See also '' Redundancy (information theory)''. Another symmetrical measure is the ''symmetric uncertainty'' , given by :U(X, Y) = 2R = 2\frac which represents the
harmonic mean In mathematics, the harmonic mean is one of several kinds of average, and in particular, one of the Pythagorean means. It is sometimes appropriate for situations when the average rate is desired. The harmonic mean can be expressed as the recipro ...
of the two uncertainty coefficients C_, C_. If we consider mutual information as a special case of the total correlation or dual total correlation, the normalized version are respectively, :\frac and \frac\; . This normalized version also known as Information Quality Ratio (IQR) which quantifies the amount of information of a variable based on another variable against total uncertainty: : IQR(X, Y) = \operatorname operatorname(X;Y) = \frac = \frac - 1 There's a normalization which derives from first thinking of mutual information as an analogue to covariance (thus Shannon entropy is analogous to
variance In probability theory and statistics, variance is the expectation of the squared deviation of a random variable from its population mean or sample mean. Variance is a measure of dispersion, meaning it is a measure of how far a set of number ...
). Then the normalized mutual information is calculated akin to the Pearson correlation coefficient, : \frac\; .


Weighted variants

In the traditional formulation of the mutual information, : \operatorname(X;Y) = \sum_ \sum_ p(x, y) \log \frac, each ''event'' or ''object'' specified by (x, y) is weighted by the corresponding probability p(x, y). This assumes that all objects or events are equivalent ''apart from'' their probability of occurrence. However, in some applications it may be the case that certain objects or events are more ''significant'' than others, or that certain patterns of association are more semantically important than others. For example, the deterministic mapping \ may be viewed as stronger than the deterministic mapping \, although these relationships would yield the same mutual information. This is because the mutual information is not sensitive at all to any inherent ordering in the variable values (, , ), and is therefore not sensitive at all to the form of the relational mapping between the associated variables. If it is desired that the former relation—showing agreement on all variable values—be judged stronger than the later relation, then it is possible to use the following ''weighted mutual information'' . : \operatorname(X;Y) = \sum_ \sum_ w(x,y) p(x,y) \log \frac, which places a weight w(x,y) on the probability of each variable value co-occurrence, p(x,y). This allows that certain probabilities may carry more or less significance than others, thereby allowing the quantification of relevant ''holistic'' or ''
Prägnanz Gestalt-psychology, gestaltism, or configurationism is a school of psychology that emerged in the early twentieth century in Austria and Germany as a theory of perception that was a rejection of basic principles of Wilhelm Wundt's and Edward T ...
'' factors. In the above example, using larger relative weights for w(1,1), w(2,2), and w(3,3) would have the effect of assessing greater ''informativeness'' for the relation \ than for the relation \, which may be desirable in some cases of pattern recognition, and the like. This weighted mutual information is a form of weighted KL-Divergence, which is known to take negative values for some inputs, and there are examples where the weighted mutual information also takes negative values.


Adjusted mutual information

A probability distribution can be viewed as a partition of a set. One may then ask: if a set were partitioned randomly, what would the distribution of probabilities be? What would the expectation value of the mutual information be? The adjusted mutual information or AMI subtracts the expectation value of the MI, so that the AMI is zero when two different distributions are random, and one when two distributions are identical. The AMI is defined in analogy to the adjusted Rand index of two different partitions of a set.


Absolute mutual information

Using the ideas of Kolmogorov complexity, one can consider the mutual information of two sequences independent of any probability distribution: : \operatorname_K(X;Y) = K(X) - K(X\mid Y). To establish that this quantity is symmetric up to a logarithmic factor (\operatorname_K(X;Y) \approx \operatorname_K(Y;X)) one requires the
chain rule for Kolmogorov complexity The chain rule for Kolmogorov complexity is an analogue of the chain rule for information entropy, which states: : H(X,Y) = H(X) + H(Y, X) That is, the combined randomness of two sequences ''X'' and ''Y'' is the sum of the randomness of ''X'' p ...
. Approximations of this quantity via compression can be used to define a distance measure to perform a
hierarchical clustering In data mining and statistics, hierarchical clustering (also called hierarchical cluster analysis or HCA) is a method of cluster analysis that seeks to build a hierarchy of clusters. Strategies for hierarchical clustering generally fall into ...
of sequences without having any domain knowledge of the sequences .


Linear correlation

Unlike correlation coefficients, such as the product moment correlation coefficient, mutual information contains information about all dependence—linear and nonlinear—and not just linear dependence as the correlation coefficient measures. However, in the narrow case that the joint distribution for X and Y is a bivariate normal distribution (implying in particular that both marginal distributions are normally distributed), there is an exact relationship between \operatorname and the correlation coefficient \rho . :\operatorname = -\frac \log\left(1 - \rho^2\right) The equation above can be derived as follows for a bivariate Gaussian: :\begin \begin X_1 \\ X_2 \end &\sim \mathcal \left( \begin \mu_1 \\ \mu_2 \end, \Sigma \right),\qquad \Sigma = \begin \sigma^2_1 & \rho\sigma_1\sigma_2 \\ \rho\sigma_1\sigma_2 & \sigma^2_2 \end \\ \Eta(X_i) &= \frac\log\left(2\pi e \sigma_i^2\right) = \frac + \frac\log(2\pi) + \log\left(\sigma_i\right), \quad i\in\ \\ \Eta(X_1, X_2) &= \frac\log\left \Sigma, \right= 1 + \log(2\pi) + \log\left(\sigma_1 \sigma_2\right) + \frac\log\left(1 - \rho^2\right) \\ \end Therefore, : \operatorname\left(X_1; X_2\right) = \Eta\left(X_1\right) + \Eta\left(X_2\right) - \Eta\left(X_1, X_2\right) = -\frac\log\left(1 - \rho^2\right)


For discrete data

When X and Y are limited to be in a discrete number of states, observation data is summarized in a contingency table, with row variable X (or i) and column variable Y (or j). Mutual information is one of the measures of association or correlation between the row and column variables. Other measures of association include
Pearson's chi-squared test Pearson's chi-squared test (\chi^2) is a statistical test applied to sets of categorical data to evaluate how likely it is that any observed difference between the sets arose by chance. It is the most widely used of many chi-squared tests (e.g., ...
statistics, G-test statistics, etc. In fact, with the same log base, mutual information will be equal to the G-test log-likelihood statistic divided by 2N, where N is the sample size.


Applications

In many applications, one wants to maximize mutual information (thus increasing dependencies), which is often equivalent to minimizing conditional entropy. Examples include: * In search engine technology, mutual information between phrases and contexts is used as a feature for
k-means clustering ''k''-means clustering is a method of vector quantization, originally from signal processing, that aims to partition ''n'' observations into ''k'' clusters in which each observation belongs to the cluster with the nearest mean (cluster centers or ...
to discover semantic clusters (concepts).Parsing a Natural Language Using Mutual Information Statistics
by David M. Magerman and Mitchell P. Marcus
For example, the mutual information of a bigram might be calculated as: : where f_ is the number of times the bigram xy appears in the corpus, f_ is the number of times the unigram x appears in the corpus, B is the total number of bigrams, and U is the total number of unigrams. * In telecommunications, the channel capacity is equal to the mutual information, maximized over all input distributions. * Discriminative training procedures for hidden Markov models have been proposed based on the
maximum mutual information In mathematical analysis, the maxima and minima (the respective plurals of maximum and minimum) of a function, known collectively as extrema (the plural of extremum), are the largest and smallest value of the function, either within a given ran ...
(MMI) criterion. *
RNA secondary structure Nucleic acid secondary structure is the basepairing interactions within a single nucleic acid polymer or between two polymers. It can be represented as a list of bases which are paired in a nucleic acid molecule. The secondary structures of biolo ...
prediction from a multiple sequence alignment. *
Phylogenetic profiling Phylogenetic profiling is a bioinformatics technique in which the joint presence or joint absence of two traits across large numbers of species is used to infer a meaningful biological connection, such as involvement of two different proteins in the ...
prediction from pairwise present and disappearance of functionally link
gene In biology, the word gene (from , ; "... Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word gene to describe the Mendelian units of heredity..." meaning ''generation'' or ''birth'' or ''gender'') can have several different meanings. The Mendelian gene is a b ...
s. * Mutual information has been used as a criterion for feature selection and feature transformations in machine learning. It can be used to characterize both the relevance and redundancy of variables, such as the
minimum redundancy feature selection Minimum redundancy feature selection is an algorithm frequently used in a method to accurately identify characteristics of genes and phenotypes and narrow down their relevance and is usually described in its pairing with relevant feature selectio ...
. * Mutual information is used in determining the similarity of two different clusterings of a dataset. As such, it provides some advantages over the traditional Rand index. * Mutual information of words is often used as a significance function for the computation of collocations in corpus linguistics. This has the added complexity that no word-instance is an instance to two different words; rather, one counts instances where 2 words occur adjacent or in close proximity; this slightly complicates the calculation, since the expected probability of one word occurring within N words of another, goes up with N * Mutual information is used in
medical imaging Medical imaging is the technique and process of imaging the interior of a body for clinical analysis and medical intervention, as well as visual representation of the function of some organs or tissues ( physiology). Medical imaging seeks to rev ...
for image registration. Given a reference image (for example, a brain scan), and a second image which needs to be put into the same coordinate system as the reference image, this image is deformed until the mutual information between it and the reference image is maximized. * Detection of phase synchronization in time series analysis. * In the
infomax Infomax is an optimization principle for artificial neural networks and other information processing systems. It prescribes that a function that maps a set of input values ''I'' to a set of output values ''O'' should be chosen or learned so as to m ...
method for neural-net and other machine learning, including the infomax-based Independent component analysis algorithm * Average mutual information in delay embedding theorem is used for determining the ''embedding delay'' parameter. * Mutual information between
genes In biology, the word gene (from , ; "...Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word gene to describe the Mendelian units of heredity..." meaning ''generation'' or ''birth'' or ''gender'') can have several different meanings. The Mendelian gene is a ba ...
in expression microarray data is used by the ARACNE algorithm for reconstruction of
gene networks A gene (or genetic) regulatory network (GRN) is a collection of molecular regulators that interact with each other and with other substances in the cell to govern the gene expression levels of mRNA and proteins which, in turn, determine the fu ...
. * In
statistical mechanics In physics, statistical mechanics is a mathematical framework that applies statistical methods and probability theory to large assemblies of microscopic entities. It does not assume or postulate any natural laws, but explains the macroscopic ...
, Loschmidt's paradox may be expressed in terms of mutual information. Hugh Everettbr>Theory of the Universal Wavefunction
Thesis, Princeton University, (1956, 1973), pp 1–140 (page 30)
Loschmidt noted that it must be impossible to determine a physical law which lacks
time reversal symmetry T-symmetry or time reversal symmetry is the theoretical symmetry of physical laws under the transformation of time reversal, : T: t \mapsto -t. Since the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy increases as time flows toward the future ...
(e.g. the second law of thermodynamics) only from physical laws which have this symmetry. He pointed out that the H-theorem of Boltzmann made the assumption that the velocities of particles in a gas were permanently uncorrelated, which removed the time symmetry inherent in the H-theorem. It can be shown that if a system is described by a probability density in
phase space In dynamical system theory, a phase space is a space in which all possible states of a system are represented, with each possible state corresponding to one unique point in the phase space. For mechanical systems, the phase space usually ...
, then Liouville's theorem implies that the joint information (negative of the joint entropy) of the distribution remains constant in time. The joint information is equal to the mutual information plus the sum of all the marginal information (negative of the marginal entropies) for each particle coordinate. Boltzmann's assumption amounts to ignoring the mutual information in the calculation of entropy, which yields the thermodynamic entropy (divided by the Boltzmann constant). * The mutual information is used to learn the structure of Bayesian networks/ dynamic Bayesian networks, which is thought to explain the causal relationship between random variables, as exemplified by the GlobalMIT toolkit: learning the globally optimal dynamic Bayesian network with the Mutual Information Test criterion. * The mutual information is used to quantify information transmitted during the updating procedure in the Gibbs sampling algorithm. * Popular cost function in decision tree learning. * The mutual information is used in
cosmology Cosmology () is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe. The term ''cosmology'' was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount's ''Glossographia'', and in 1731 taken up in Latin by German philosophe ...
to test the influence of large-scale environments on galaxy properties in the
Galaxy Zoo Galaxy Zoo is a crowdsourced astronomy project which invites people to assist in the morphological classification of large numbers of galaxies. It is an example of citizen science as it enlists the help of members of the public to help in scie ...
. * The mutual information was used in Solar Physics to derive the solar differential rotation profile, a travel-time deviation map for sunspots, and a time–distance diagram from quiet-Sun measurements * Used in Invariant Information Clustering to automatically train neural network classifiers and image segmenters given no labelled data.Invariant Information Clustering for Unsupervised Image Classification and Segmentation
by Xu Ji, Joao Henriques and Andrea Vedaldi


See also

* Data differencing * Pointwise mutual information * Quantum mutual information *
Specific-information In information theory, specific-information is the generic name given to the family of state-dependent measures that in expectation converge to the mutual information. There are currently three known varieties of specific information usually den ...


Notes


References

* * * * * * English translation of original in ''Uspekhi Matematicheskikh Nauk'' 12 (1): 3-52. * * * * David J. C. MacKay.
Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms
' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. (available free online) * *
Athanasios Papoulis Athanasios Papoulis ( el, Αθανάσιος Παπούλης; 1921 – April 25, 2002) was a Greek- American engineer and applied mathematician. Life Papoulis was born in modern day Turkey in 1921, and his family was moved to Athens, Greece ...
. ''Probability, Random Variables, and Stochastic Processes'', second edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984. ''(See Chapter 15.)'' * * * * * {{Authority control Information theory Entropy and information