tf.contrib.distributions.Mixture.entropy_lower_bound()

tf.contrib.distributions.Mixture.entropy_lower_bound(name='entropy_lower_bound')

A lower bound on the entropy of this mixture model.

The bound below is not always very tight, and its usefulness depends on the mixture probabilities and the components in use.

A lower bound is useful for ELBO when the Mixture is the variational distribution:

\( \log p(x) >= ELBO = \int q(z) \log p(x, z) dz + H[q] \)

where \( p \) is the prior disribution, \( q \) is the variational, and \( H[q] \) is the entropy of \( q \). If there is a lower bound \( G[q] \) such that \( H[q] \geq G[q] \) then it can be used in place of \( H[q] \).

For a mixture of distributions \( q(Z) = \sum_i c_i q_i(Z) \) with \( \sum_i c_i = 1 \), by the concavity of \( f(x) = -x \log x \), a simple lower bound is:

\( \begin{align} H[q] & = - \int q(z) \log q(z) dz \\\ & = - \int (\sum_i c_i q_i(z)) \log(\sum_i c_i q_i(z)) dz \\\ & \geq - \sum_i c_i \int q_i(z) \log q_i(z) dz \\\ & = \sum_i c_i H[q_i] \end{align} \)

This is the term we calculate below for \( G[q] \).

Args:

• name: A name for this operation (optional).

Returns:

A lower bound on the Mixture's entropy.