Cosyne 2007 Workshops
February 26-27, 2007
The Canyons, Utah
Speaker Name
Jonathan Victor (Cornell)
Talk Title
Why it is difficult to calculate information, and why there are so many approaches
Talk Abstract
Estimation of entropy and information is much more challenging than estimation of other statistics, such as mean and variance. While this can be viewed from a philosophical standpoint ("you don't know what you don't know"), I will suggest that it has an elementary mathematical basis.
One reason that there are many ways of estimating these quantities is that there are several reasonable choices for mathematical entities that can be used to represent spike trains -- discrete, continuous, and hybrid. I will suggest that information estimates are useful not only in situations in which these approaches provide mutually consistent results, but also in situations in which they differ.
