8 research outputs found
Collision Entropy Estimation in a One-Line Formula
We address the unsolved question of how best to estimate the collision entropy, also called quadratic or second order Rényi entropy. Integer-order Rényi entropies are synthetic indices useful for the characterization of probability distributions. In recent decades, numerous studies have been conducted to arrive at their valid estimates starting from experimental data, so to derive suitable classification methods for the underlying processes, but optimal solutions have not been reached yet. Limited to the estimation of collision entropy, a one-line formula is presented here. The results of some specific Monte Carlo experiments give evidence of the validity of this estimator even for the very low densities of the data spread in high-dimensional sample spaces. The method strengths are unbiased consistency, generality and minimum computational cost
LIPIcs
We revisit the problem of estimating entropy of discrete distributions from independent samples, studied recently by Acharya, Orlitsky, Suresh and Tyagi (SODA 2015), improving their upper and lower bounds on the necessary sample size n. For estimating Renyi entropy of order alpha, up to constant accuracy and error probability, we show the following * Upper bounds n = O(1) 2^{(1-1/alpha)H_alpha} for integer alpha>1, as the worst case over distributions with Renyi entropy equal to H_alpha. * Lower bounds n = Omega(1) K^{1-1/alpha} for any real alpha>1, with the constant being an inverse polynomial of the accuracy, as the worst case over all distributions on K elements. Our upper bounds essentially replace the alphabet size by a factor exponential in the entropy, which offers improvements especially in low or medium entropy regimes (interesting for example in anomaly detection). As for the lower bounds, our proof explicitly shows how the complexity depends on both alphabet and accuracy, partially solving the open problem posted in previous works. The argument for upper bounds derives a clean identity for the variance of falling-power sum of a multinomial distribution. Our approach for lower bounds utilizes convex optimization to find a distribution with possibly worse estimation performance, and may be of independent interest as a tool to work with Le Cam’s two point method
FERMI: Fair Empirical Risk Minimization via Exponential R\'enyi Mutual Information
Despite the success of large-scale empirical risk minimization (ERM) at
achieving high accuracy across a variety of machine learning tasks, fair ERM is
hindered by the incompatibility of fairness constraints with stochastic
optimization. In this paper, we propose the fair empirical risk minimization
via exponential R\'enyi mutual information (FERMI) framework. FERMI is built on
a stochastic estimator for exponential R\'enyi mutual information (ERMI), an
information divergence measuring the degree of the dependence of predictions on
sensitive attributes. Theoretically, we show that ERMI upper bounds existing
popular fairness violation metrics, thus controlling ERMI provides guarantees
on other commonly used violations, such as . We derive an unbiased
estimator for ERMI, which we use to derive the FERMI algorithm. We prove that
FERMI converges for demographic parity, equalized odds, and equal opportunity
notions of fairness in stochastic optimization. Empirically, we show that FERMI
is amenable to large-scale problems with multiple (non-binary) sensitive
attributes and non-binary targets. Extensive experiments show that FERMI
achieves the most favorable tradeoffs between fairness violation and test
accuracy across all tested setups compared with state-of-the-art baselines for
demographic parity, equalized odds, equal opportunity. These benefits are
especially significant for non-binary classification with large sensitive sets
and small batch sizes, showcasing the effectiveness of the FERMI objective and
the developed stochastic algorithm for solving it.Comment: 29 page