@inproceedings{
butakov2024mutual,
title={Mutual Information Estimation via Normalizing Flows},
author={Ivan Butakov and Alexander Tolmachev and Sofia Malanchuk and Anna Neopryatnaya and Alexey Frolov},
booktitle={The Thirty-eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=JiQXsLvDls}
}
We propose a novel approach to the problem of mutual information (MI) estimation via introducing a family of estimators based on normalizing flows. The estimator maps original data to the target distribution, for which MI is easier to estimate. We additionally explore the target distributions with known closed-form expressions for MI. Theoretical guarantees are provided to demonstrate that our approach yields MI estimates for the original data. Experiments with high-dimensional data are conducted to highlight the practical advantages of the proposed method.
Mutual Information Estimation via Normalizing Flows
Ivan Butakov Alexander Tolmachev Sofia Malanchuk Anna Neopryatnaya Alexey Frolov