On Classification of Bivariate Distributions Based on Mutual Information

Among all measures of independence between random variables, mutual information is the only one that is based on information theory. Mutual information takes into account of all kinds of dependencies between variables, i.e., both the linear and non-linear dependencies. In this paper we have classified some well-known bivariate distributions into two classes of distributions based on their mutual information. The distributions within each class have the same mutual information. These distributions have been used extensively as survival distributions of two component systems in reliability theory.