• DocumentCode
    3127188
  • Title

    Information divergence is more χ2-distributed than the χ2-statistics

  • Author

    Harremoës, Peter ; Tusnády, Gábor

  • Author_Institution
    Copenhagen Bus. Coll., Copenhagen, Denmark
  • fYear
    2012
  • fDate
    1-6 July 2012
  • Firstpage
    533
  • Lastpage
    537
  • Abstract
    For testing goodness of fit it is very popular to use either the χ2-statistic or G2-statistics (information divergence). Asymptotically both are χ2-distributed so an obvious question is which of the two statistics that has a distribution that is closest to the χ2-distribution. Surprisingly, when there is only one degree of freedom it seems like the distribution of information divergence is much better approximated by a χ2-distribution than the χ2-statistic. For random variables we introduce a new transformation that transform several important distributions into new random variables that are almost Gaussian. For the binomial distributions and the Poisson distributions we formulate a general conjecture about how close their transform are to the Gaussian. The conjecture is proved for Poisson distributions.
  • Keywords
    Gaussian distribution; Poisson distribution; binomial distribution; random processes; statistical testing; χ2-statistic; G2-statistics; Gaussian; Poisson distribution; binomial distribution; information divergence; random variable; testing goodness; Approximation methods; Information theory; Random variables; Standards; Testing; Transforms;
  • fLanguage
    English
  • Publisher
    ieee
  • Conference_Titel
    Information Theory Proceedings (ISIT), 2012 IEEE International Symposium on
  • Conference_Location
    Cambridge, MA
  • ISSN
    2157-8095
  • Print_ISBN
    978-1-4673-2580-6
  • Electronic_ISBN
    2157-8095
  • Type

    conf

  • DOI
    10.1109/ISIT.2012.6284247
  • Filename
    6284247