k-Nearest Neighbor Based Consistent Entropy Estimation for Hyperspherical Distributions

A consistent entropy estimator for hyperspherical data is proposed based on the k-nearest neighbor (knn) approach. The asymptotic unbiasedness and consistency of the estimator are proved. Moreover, cross entropy and Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence estimators are also discussed. Simulation studies a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Michael E. Andrew, Shengqiao Li, Robert M. Mnatsakanov
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2011-03-01
Series:Entropy
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/13/3/650/
Description
Summary:A consistent entropy estimator for hyperspherical data is proposed based on the k-nearest neighbor (knn) approach. The asymptotic unbiasedness and consistency of the estimator are proved. Moreover, cross entropy and Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence estimators are also discussed. Simulation studies are conducted to assess the performance of the estimators for models including uniform and von Mises-Fisher distributions. The proposed knn entropy estimator is compared with the moment based counterpart via simulations. The results show that these two methods are comparable.
ISSN:1099-4300