Combining marginal probability distributions via minimization of weighted sum of Kullback–Leibler divergences Original Research Article

This paper deals with the problem of combining marginal probability distributions as a means for aggregating pieces of expert information. A novel approach, which takes the combining problem as an analogy of statistical estimation, is proposed and discussed. The combined distribution is then searched as a minimizer of a weighted sum of Kullback–Leibler divergences of the given marginal distributions and corresponding marginals of the searched one. Necessary and sufficient conditions for a distribution to be a minimizer are stated. For discrete random variables an iterative algorithm for approximate solution of the minimization problem is proposed and its convergence is proved.