Statistical tests based on Rényi entropy estimation

Abstract

Entropy and its various generalizations are important in many fields, including mathematical statistics, communication theory, physics and computer science, for characterizing the amount of information associated with a probability distribution. In this paper we propose goodness-offit statistics for the multivariate Student and multivariate Pearson type II distributions, based on the maximum entropy principle and a class of estimators for Rényi entropy based on nearest neighbour distances. We prove the L 2 -consistency of these statistics using results on the subadditivity of Euclidean functionals on nearest neighbour graphs, and investigate their rate of convergence and asymptotic distribution using Monte Carlo methods. In addition we present a novel iterative method for estimating the shape parameter of the multivariate Student and multivariate Pearson type II distributions.