Two types of geometric Jensen-Shannon divergences

Author

Nielsen, Frank

Abstract

The geometric Jensen–Shannon divergence (G-JSD) has gained popularity in machine learning and information sciences thanks to its closed-form expression between Gaussian distributions. In this work, we introduce an alternative definition of the geometric Jensen–Shannon divergence tailored to positive densities which does not normalize geometric mixtures. This novel divergence is termed the extended G-JSD, as it applies to the more general case of positive measures. We explicitly report the gap between the extended G-JSD and the G-JSD when considering probability densities, and show how to express the G-JSD and extended G-JSD using the Jeffreys divergence and the Bhattacharyya distance or Bhattacharyya coefficient. The extended G-JSD is proven to be an f-divergence, which is a separable divergence satisfying information monotonicity and invariance in information geometry. We derive a corresponding closed-form formula for the two types of G-JSDs when considering the case of multivariate Gaussian distributions that is often met in applications. We consider Monte Carlo stochastic estimations and approximations of the two types of G-JSD using the projective 𝛾-divergences. Although the square root of the JSD yields a metric distance, we show that this is no longer the case for the two types of G-JSD. Finally, we explain how these two types of geometric JSDs can be interpreted as regularizations of the ordinary JSD.