Entropy (information theory)

About: Entropy (information theory) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 23293 publications have been published within this topic receiving 472212 citations. The topic is also known as: entropy & Shannon entropy.

Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actor

Abstract: Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been demonstrated on a range of challenging decision making and control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from two major challenges: very high sample complexity and brittle convergence properties, which necessitate meticulous hyperparameter tuning. Both of these challenges severely limit the applicability of such methods to complex, real-world domains. In this paper, we propose soft actor-critic, an off-policy actor-critic deep RL algorithm based on the maximum entropy reinforcement learning framework. In this framework, the actor aims to maximize expected reward while also maximizing entropy. That is, to succeed at the task while acting as randomly as possible. Prior deep RL methods based on this framework have been formulated as Q-learning methods. By combining off-policy updates with a stable stochastic actor-critic formulation, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on a range of continuous control benchmark tasks, outperforming prior on-policy and off-policy methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate that, in contrast to other off-policy algorithms, our approach is very stable, achieving very similar performance across different random seeds.

Prediction and entropy of printed English

Abstract: A new method of estimating the entropy and redundancy of a language is described. This method exploits the knowledge of the language statistics possessed by those who speak the language, and depends on experimental results in prediction of the next letter when the preceding text is known. Results of experiments in prediction are given, and some properties of an ideal predictor are developed.

An entropy based classification scheme for land applications of polarimetric SAR

Abstract: The authors outline a new scheme for parameterizing polarimetric scattering problems, which has application in the quantitative analysis of polarimetric SAR data. The method relies on an eigenvalue analysis of the coherency matrix and employs a three-level Bernoulli statistical model to generate estimates of the average target scattering matrix parameters from the data. The scattering entropy is a key parameter is determining the randomness in this model and is seen as a fundamental parameter in assessing the importance of polarimetry in remote sensing problems. The authors show application of the method to some important classical random media scattering problems and apply it to POLSAR data from the NASA/JPL AIRSAR data base.

Supervised and unsupervised discretization of continuous features

Abstract: Many supervised machine learning algorithms require a discrete feature space. In this paper, we review previous work on continuous feature discretization, identify defining characteristics of the methods, and conduct an empirical evaluation of several methods. We compare binning, an unsupervised discretization method, to entropy-based and purity-based methods, which are supervised algorithms. We found that the performance of the Naive-Bayes algorithm significantly improved when features were discretized using an entropy-based method. In fact, over the 16 tested datasets, the discretized version of Naive-Bayes slightly outperformed C4.5 on average. We also show that in some cases, the performance of the C4.5 induction algorithm significantly improved if features were discretized in advance; in our experiments, the performance never significantly degraded, an interesting phenomenon considering the fact that C4.5 is capable of locally discretizing features.