Minimal Achievable Sufficient Statistic Learning (1905.07822v2)

Abstract: We introduce Minimal Achievable Sufficient Statistic (MASS) Learning, a training method for machine learning models that attempts to produce minimal sufficient statistics with respect to a class of functions (e.g. deep networks) being optimized over. In deriving MASS Learning, we also introduce Conserved Differential Information (CDI), an information-theoretic quantity that - unlike standard mutual information - can be usefully applied to deterministically-dependent continuous random variables like the input and output of a deep network. In a series of experiments, we show that deep networks trained with MASS Learning achieve competitive performance on supervised learning and uncertainty quantification benchmarks.