Average Entropy of Gaussian Mixtures

Abstract

We calculate the average differential entropy of a q-component Gaussian mixture in Rn. For simplicity, all components have covariance matrix σ21, while the means {Wi}i=1q are i.i.d. Gaussian vectors with zero mean and covariance s21. We obtain a series expansion in μ=s2/σ2 for the average differential entropy up to order O(μ2), and we provide a recipe to calculate higher-order terms. Our result provides an analytic approximation with a quantifiable order of magnitude for the error, which is not achieved in previous literature.