Some applications of Kullback-Leibler and Jeffreys’ divergences in multinomial populations

Abstract

Some of the entropy measures proposed are Shannon entropy(1948), Renyi entropy (1961),   Havrda&Charvat entropy(1967), and Tsallis entropy (1988).   The limit of Renyi divergence is relative entropy (or Kullback-Leibler divergence) which  is a measure of discrepancy between two statistical hypotheses or two probability distributions. Jeffreys’ divergence is a measure of difficulty of making a discrimination between two probability distributions. These  divergence measures are related to some chi-square distributions asymptotically such that they can be used in some hypothesis tests.  In this study I try to show that entropy based statistics like Kullback-Leibler divergence and Jeffreys’ divergence can  be used in some statistical hypothesis tests for multinomial populations by some examples.