"On the Entropy of Sums of Bernoulli Random Variables via the Chen-Stein Method"

Igal Sason

Associate Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering
Meyer Building, office 1058
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Haifa 32000, Israel

Abstract:

This talk considers the entropy of the sum of (possibly dependent and non-identically distributed) Bernoulli random variables. Upper bounds on the error that follows from an approximation of this entropy by the entropy of a Poisson random variable with the same mean are derived. The derivation of these bounds combines elements of information theory with the Chen-Stein method for Poisson approximation. The resulting bounds are easy to compute, and their applicability is exemplified. This talk presents in part the first half of the paper entitled: "An information-theoretic perspective of the Poisson approximation via the Chen-Stein method'' (see:http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.6811).

Biography:

Igal Sason received his academic degrees in electrical engineering from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. During 2001 - 2003, he was a post-doc. in the Faculty of Computer Science and Communications at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. Since 2003, he has been with the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Technion where he is currently an Associate Professor. His research interests include coding theory and information theory, and more recently he is interested in relationships between information theory and probability theory.