Pointwise mutual information | EPFL Graph Search

In statistics, probability theory and information theory, pointwise mutual information (PMI), or point mutual information, is a measure of association. It compares the probability of two events occurring together to what this probability would be if the events were independent. PMI (especially in its positive pointwise mutual information variant) has been described as "one of the most important concepts in NLP", where it "draws on the intuition that the best way to weigh the association between two words is to ask how much more the two words co-occur in [a] corpus than we would have a priori expected them to appear by chance." The concept was introduced in 1961 by Robert Fano under the name of "mutual information", but today that term is instead used for a related measure of dependence between random variables: The mutual information (MI) of two discrete random variables refers to the average PMI of all possible events. Definition The PM

Statistical limits of high-dimensional inference problems

Clément Dominique Luneau

This thesis focuses on two kinds of statistical inference problems in signal processing and data science. The first problem is the estimation of a structured informative tensor from the observation of a noisy tensor in which it is buried. The structure comes from the possibility to decompose the informative tensor as the sum of a small number of rank-one tensors (small compared to its size). Such structure has applications in data science where data, organized into arrays, can often be explained by the interaction between a few features characteristic of the problem. The second problem is the estimation of a signal input to a feedforward neural network whose output is observed. It is relevant for many applications (phase retrieval, quantized signals) where the relation between the measurements and the quantities of interest is not linear. We look at these two statistical models in different high-dimensional limits corresponding to situations where the amount of observations and size of the signal become infinitely large. These asymptotic regimes are motivated by the ever-increasing computational power and storage capacity that make possible the processing and handling of large data sets. We take an information-theoretic approach in order to establish fundamental statistical limits of estimation in high-dimensional regimes. In particular, the main contributions of this thesis are the proofs of exact formulas for the asymptotic normalized mutual information associated with these inference problems. These are low-dimensional variational formulas that can nonetheless capture the behavior of a large system where each component interacts with all the others. Owing to the relationship between mutual information and Bayesian inference, we use the solutions to these variational problems to rigorously predict the asymptotic minimum mean-square error (MMSE), the error achieved by the (Bayes) optimal estimator. We can thus compare algorithmic performances to the statistical limit given by the MMSE. Variational formulas for the mutual information are referred to as replica symmetric (RS) ansätze due to the predictions of the heuristic replica method from statistical physics. In the past decade proofs of the validity of these predictions started to emerge. The general strategy is to show that the RS ansatz is both an upper and lower bound on the asymptotic normalized mutual information. The present work leverages on the adaptive interpolation method that proposes a unified way to prove the two bounds. We extend the adaptive interpolation to situations where the order parameter of the problem is not a scalar but a matrix, and to high-dimensional regimes that differ from the one for which the RS formula is usually conjectured. Our proofs also demonstrate the modularity of the method. Indeed, using statistical models previously studied in the literature as building blocks of more complex ones (e.g., estimated signal with a model of structure), we derive RS formulas for the normalized mutual information associated with estimation problems that are relevant to modern applications.

EPFL2021

High-Dimensional Inference on Dense Graphs with Applications to Coding Theory and Machine Learning

Mohamad Baker Dia

We are living in the era of "Big Data", an era characterized by a voluminous amount of available data. Such amount is mainly due to the continuing advances in the computational capabilities for capturing, storing, transmitting and processing data. However, it is not always the volume of data that matters, but rather the "relevant" information that resides in it. Exactly 70 years ago, Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, was able to quantify the amount of information in a communication scenario based on a probabilistic model of the data. It turns out that Shannon's theory can be adapted to various probability-based information processing fields, ranging from coding theory to machine learning. The computation of some information theoretic quantities, such as the mutual information, can help in setting fundamental limits and devising more efficient algorithms for many inference problems. This thesis deals with two different, yet intimately related, inference problems in the fields of coding theory and machine learning. We use Bayesian probabilistic formulations for both problems, and we analyse them in the asymptotic high-dimensional regime. The goal of our analysis is to assess the algorithmic performance on the first hand and to predict the Bayes-optimal performance on the second hand, using an information theoretic approach. To this end, we employ powerful analytical tools from statistical physics. The first problem is a recent forward-error-correction code called sparse superposition code. We consider the extension of such code to a large class of noisy channels by exploiting the similarity with the compressed sensing paradigm. Moreover, we show the amenability of sparse superposition codes to perform joint distribution matching and channel coding. In the second problem, we study symmetric rank-one matrix factorization, a prominent model in machine learning and statistics with many applications ranging from community detection to sparse principal component analysis. We provide an explicit expression for the normalized mutual information and the minimum mean-square error of this model in the asymptotic limit. This allows us to prove the optimality of a certain iterative algorithm on a large set of parameters. A common feature of the two problems stems from the fact that both of them are represented on dense graphical models. Hence, similar message-passing algorithms and analysis tools can be adopted. Furthermore, spatial coupling, a new technique introduced in the context of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, can be applied to both problems. Spatial coupling is used in this thesis as a "construction technique" to boost the algorithmic performance and as a "proof technique" to compute some information theoretic quantities. Moreover, both of our problems retain close connections with spin glass models studied in statistical mechanics of disordered systems. This allows us to use sophisticated techniques developed in statistical physics. In this thesis, we use the potential function predicted by the replica method in order to prove the threshold saturation phenomenon associated with spatially coupled models. Moreover, one of the main contributions of this thesis is proving that the predictions given by the "heuristic" replica method are exact. Hence, our results could be of great interest for the statistical physics community as well, as they help to set a rigorous mathematical foundation of the replica predictions.

EPFL2018