Information geometry on hierarchy of probability distributions

Abstract

An exponential family or mixture family of probability distributions has a natural hierarchical structure. This paper gives an "orthogonal" decomposition of such a system based on information geometry. A typical example is the decomposition of stochastic dependency among a number of random variables. In general, they have a complex structure of dependencies. Pairwise dependency is easily represented by correlation, but it is more difficult to measure effects of pure triplewise or higher order interactions (dependencies) among these variables. Stochastic dependency is decomposed quantitatively into an "orthogonal" sum of pairwise, triplewise, and further higher order dependencies. This gives a new invariant decomposition of joint entropy. This problem is important for extracting intrinsic interactions in firing patterns of an ensemble of neurons and for estimating its functional connections. The orthogonal decomposition is given in a wide class of hierarchical structures including both exponential and mixture families. As an example, we decompose the dependency in a higher order Markov chain into a sum of those in various lower order Markov chains.