M. Ashok Kumar

Kumar Vijay Mishra, M. Ashok Kumar, Ting-Kam Leonard Wong

Information geometry is a study of statistical manifolds, that is, spaces of probability distributions from a geometric perspective. Its classical information-theoretic applications relate to statistical concepts such as Fisher information, sufficient statistics, and efficient estimators. Today, information geometry has emerged as an interdisciplinary field that finds applications in diverse areas such as radar sensing, array signal processing, quantum physics, deep learning, and optimal transport. This article presents an overview of essential information geometry to initiate an information theorist, who may be unfamiliar with this exciting area of research. We explain the concepts of divergences on statistical manifolds, generalized notions of distances, orthogonality, and geodesics, thereby paving the way for concrete applications and novel theoretical investigations. We also highlight some recent information-geometric developments, which are of interest to the broader information theory community.

Kumar Vijay Mishra, M. Ashok Kumar

We examine the role of information geometry in the context of classical Cramér-Rao (CR) type inequalities. In particular, we focus on Eguchi's theory of obtaining dualistic geometric structures from a divergence function and then applying Amari-Nagoaka's theory to obtain a CR type inequality. The classical deterministic CR inequality is derived from Kullback-Leibler (KL)-divergence. We show that this framework could be generalized to other CR type inequalities through four examples: $α$-version of CR inequality, generalized CR inequality, Bayesian CR inequality, and Bayesian $α$-CR inequality. These are obtained from, respectively, $I_α$-divergence (or relative $α$-entropy), generalized Csiszár divergence, Bayesian KL divergence, and Bayesian $I_α$-divergence.

Kumar Vijay Mishra, M. Ashok Kumar

The relative $α$-entropy is the Rényi analog of relative entropy and arises prominently in information-theoretic problems. Recent information geometric investigations on this quantity have enabled the generalization of the Cramér-Rao inequality, which provides a lower bound for the variance of an estimator of an escort of the underlying parametric probability distribution. However, this framework remains unexamined in the Bayesian framework. In this paper, we propose a general Riemannian metric based on relative $α$-entropy to obtain a generalized Bayesian Cramér-Rao inequality. This establishes a lower bound for the variance of an unbiased estimator for the $α$-escort distribution starting from an unbiased estimator for the underlying distribution. We show that in the limiting case when the entropy order approaches unity, this framework reduces to the conventional Bayesian Cramér-Rao inequality. Further, in the absence of priors, the same framework yields the deterministic Cramér-Rao inequality.

M. Ashok Kumar, Kumar Vijay Mishra

We study the geometry of probability distributions with respect to a generalized family of Csiszár $f$-divergences. A member of this family is the relative $α$-entropy which is also a Rényi analog of relative entropy in information theory and known as logarithmic or projective power divergence in statistics. We apply Eguchi's theory to derive the Fisher information metric and the dual affine connections arising from these generalized divergence functions. This enables us to arrive at a more widely applicable version of the Cramér-Rao inequality, which provides a lower bound for the variance of an estimator for an escort of the underlying parametric probability distribution. We then extend the Amari-Nagaoka's dually flat structure of the exponential and mixer models to other distributions with respect to the aforementioned generalized metric. We show that these formulations lead us to find unbiased and efficient estimators for the escort model. Finally, we compare our work with prior results on generalized Cramér-Rao inequalities that were derived from non-information-geometric frameworks.