A Historical Perspective on Schützenberger-Pinsker Inequalities

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Abstract

This paper presents a tutorial overview of so-called Pinsker inequalities which establish a precise relationship between information and statistics, and whose use have become ubiquitous in many information theoretic applications. According to Stigler’s law of eponymy, no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. Pinsker’s inequality is no exception: Years before the publication of Pinsker’s book in 1960, the French medical doctor, geneticist, epidemiologist, and mathematician Marcel-Paul (Marco) Schützenberger, in his 1953 doctoral thesis, not only proved what is now called Pinsker’s inequality (with the optimal constant that Pinsker himself did not establish) but also the optimal second-order improvement, more than a decade before Kullback’s derivation of the same inequality. We review Schûtzenberger and Pinsker contributions as well as those of Volkonskii & Rozanov, Sakaguchi, McKean, Csiszár, Kullback, Kemperman, Vajda, Bretagnolle & Huber, Krafft & Schmitz, Toussaint, Reid & Williamson, Gilardoni, as well as the optimal derivation of Fedotov, Harremoës, & Topsøe.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationGeometric Science of Information - 6th International Conference, GSI 2023, Proceedings
EditorsFrank Nielsen, Frédéric Barbaresco
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages291-306
Number of pages16
ISBN (Print)9783031382703
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2023
EventThe 6th International Conference on Geometric Science of Information, GSI 2023 - St. Malo, France
Duration: 30 Aug 20231 Sept 2023

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume14071 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

ConferenceThe 6th International Conference on Geometric Science of Information, GSI 2023
Country/TerritoryFrance
CitySt. Malo
Period30/08/231/09/23

Keywords

  • Data processing inequality
  • Kullback-Leibler divergence
  • Mutual Information
  • Pinsker inequality
  • Statistical Distance
  • Total variation

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