Anarchists, Unite
Moshe Gabel, Daniel Keren, Assaf Schuster · 2017
Entropy is a fundamental property of data and a key metric in many scientific and engineering fields. Entropy estimation has been extensively studied, but almost always under the assumption that there is a single data stream, seen in its entirety by one node running the estimation algorithm. Multiple distributed data sources are becoming increasingly common, however, with applications in signal processing, computer science, medicine, physics, and more. Centralizing all data can be infeasible, for example in networks of battery or bandwidth limited sensors, so entropy estimation in distributed streams requires new, communication-efficient approaches.