Generalized Exponential Concentration Inequality for Rényi Divergence Estimation

Abstract

Estimating divergences in a consistent way is of great importance in many machine learning tasks. Although this is a fundamental problem in nonparametric statistics, to the best of our knowledge there has been no finite sample exponential inequality convergence bound derived for any divergence estimators. The main contribution of our work is to provide such a bound for an estimator of Rényi-$\alpha$ divergence for a smooth Hölder class of densities on the $d$-dimensional unit cube $[0,1{]}^d$. We also illustrate our theoretical results with a numerical experiment.

In 31st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2014