David Haussler

Abstract for Recent Publication

"A General Minimax Result for Relative Entropy"
David Haussler, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory [postscript]

Abstract:
Suppose nature picks a probability measure P_theta on a complete separable metric space X at random from a measurable set P_Theta = {P_theta : theta \in Theta}. Then, without knowing theta, a statistician picks a measure Q on X. Finally, the statistician suffers a loss D(P_\theta||Q), the relative entropy between P_theta and Q. We show that the minimax and maximin values of this game are always equal, and there is always a minimax strategy in the closure of the set of all Bayes strategies. This generalizes previous results of Gallager, and Davisson and Leon-Garcia.