The Lack of Convexity of the Relevance-Compression Function

04/22/2022

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by   Albert E Parker, et al.

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In this paper we investigate the convexity of the relevance-compression function for the Information Bottleneck and the Information Distortion problems. This curve is an analog of the rate-distortion curve, which is convex. In the problems we discuss in this paper, the distortion function is not a linear function of the quantizer, and the relevance-compression function is not necessarily convex (concave), but can change its convexity. We relate this phenomena with existence of first order phase transitions in the corresponding Lagrangian as a function of the annealing parameter.