TY - JOUR AU - Montalvão, Jugurta AU - Attux, Romis AU - Silva, Daniel PY - 2014/07/28 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - A pragmatic entropy and differential entropy estimator for small datasets JF - Journal of Communication and Information Systems JA - Journal of Communication and Information Systems VL - 29 IS - 1 SE - Letters DO - 10.14209/jcis.2014.8 UR - https://jcis.sbrt.org.br/jcis/article/view/53 SP - AB - A pragmatic approach for entropy estimation is presented, first for discrete variables, then in the form of an extension for handling continuous and/or multivariate ones. It is based on coincidence detection, and its application leads to algorithms with three main attractive features: they are easy to use, can be employed without any a priori knowledge concerning source distribution (not even the alphabet cardinality K of discrete sources) and can provide useful estimates even when the number of samples is small (e.g. less than K, for discrete variables). ER -