# Jensen–Shannon divergence

Jensen–Shannon divergence

In probability theory and statistics, the Jensen-Shannon divergence is a popular method of measuring the similarity between two probability distributions. It is also known as information radius (IRad) [cite book |author=Hinrich Schütze; Christopher D. Manning|title=Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing |publisher=MIT Press |location=Cambridge, Mass |year=1999 |pages=p. 304 |isbn=0-262-13360-1 |url=http://nlp.stanford.edu/fsnlp/ |doi=] or total divergence to the average [cite journal|title=Similarity-Based Methods For Word Sense Disambiguation|journal=Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and Eighth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics|date=1997|first=Ido|last=Dagan|coauthors=Lillian Lee, Fernando Pereira|volume=|issue=|pages=pp. 56–63|id= |url=http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/dagan97similaritybased.html|format=|accessdate=2008-03-09 ] . It is based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence, with the notable (and useful) difference that it is always a finite value.

Definition

Consider the set $M_+^1\left(A\right)$ of probability distributions where A is a set provided with some σ-algebra.

Jensen-Shannon divergence (JSD) $M_+^1\left(A\right) imes M_+^1\left(A\right) ightarrow \left[0,1\right]$ is a symmetrized and smoothed version of the Kullback-Leibler divergence$D\left(P parallel Q\right)$.It is defined by

$JSD\left(P parallel Q\right)= frac\left\{1\right\}\left\{2\right\}D\left(P parallel M\right)+frac\left\{1\right\}\left\{2\right\}D\left(Q parallel M\right)$

where $M=frac\left\{1\right\}\left\{2\right\}\left(P+Q\right)$

ee also

Kullback-Leibler divergence for details about calculating the Jensen-Shannon divergence.

References

*Jensen-Shannon Divergence and Hilbert space embedding, Bent Fuglede and Flemming Topsøe University of Copenhagen, Department of Mathematics [http://www.math.ku.dk/~topsoe/ISIT2004JSD.pdf]
* J. Lin. [http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/context/395386/0 Divergence measures based on the shannon entropy.] IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, 37(1):145--151, January 1991.
* Y. Ofran & B. Rost. [http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ofran03analysing.html Analysing Six Types of Protein-Protein Interfaces.] 2003.

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