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A Theory of Usable Information Under Computational Constraints

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arxiv 2002.10689 v1 pith:FK6FJ3MC submitted 2020-02-25 cs.LG stat.ML

classification cs.LGstat.ML
keywords informationmathcalcomputationalconstraintslearningmutualdatapredictive
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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abstract

We propose a new framework for reasoning about information in complex systems. Our foundation is based on a variational extension of Shannon's information theory that takes into account the modeling power and computational constraints of the observer. The resulting \emph{predictive $\mathcal{V}$-information} encompasses mutual information and other notions of informativeness such as the coefficient of determination. Unlike Shannon's mutual information and in violation of the data processing inequality, $\mathcal{V}$-information can be created through computation. This is consistent with deep neural networks extracting hierarchies of progressively more informative features in representation learning. Additionally, we show that by incorporating computational constraints, $\mathcal{V}$-information can be reliably estimated from data even in high dimensions with PAC-style guarantees. Empirically, we demonstrate predictive $\mathcal{V}$-information is more effective than mutual information for structure learning and fair representation learning.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

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