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In probability and statistics, the Hellinger distance (closely related to, although different from, the Bhattacharyya distance) is used to quantify the similarity between two probability distributions. It is a type of f-divergence. The Hellinger distance is defined in terms of the Hellinger integral, which was introduced by Ernst Hellinger in 1909.
Notably, except for total variation distance, all others are special cases of -divergence, or linear sums of -divergences. For each f-divergence D f {\displaystyle D_{f}} , its generating function is not uniquely defined, but only up to c ⋅ ( t − 1 ) {\displaystyle c\cdot (t-1)} , where c {\displaystyle c} is any real constant.
Many terms are used to refer to various notions of distance; these are often confusingly similar, and may be used inconsistently between authors and over time, either loosely or with precise technical meaning. In addition to "distance", similar terms include deviance, deviation, discrepancy, discrimination, and divergence, as well as others ...
The term "divergence" is in contrast to a distance (metric), since the symmetrized divergence does not satisfy the triangle inequality. [10] Numerous references to earlier uses of the symmetrized divergence and to other statistical distances are given in Kullback (1959 , pp. 6–7, §1.3 Divergence).
The total variation distance (or half the norm) arises as the optimal transportation cost, when the cost function is (,) =, that is, ‖ ‖ = (,) = {(): =, =} = [], where the expectation is taken with respect to the probability measure on the space where (,) lives, and the infimum is taken over all such with marginals and , respectively.
The only divergence for probabilities over a finite alphabet that is both an f-divergence and a Bregman divergence is the Kullback–Leibler divergence. [8] The squared Euclidean divergence is a Bregman divergence (corresponding to the function x 2 {\displaystyle x^{2}} ) but not an f -divergence.
In statistics, the Bhattacharyya distance is a quantity which represents a notion of similarity between two probability distributions. [1] It is closely related to the Bhattacharyya coefficient , which is a measure of the amount of overlap between two statistical samples or populations.
Viewing the Kullback–Leibler divergence as a measure of distance, the I-projection is the "closest" distribution to q of all the distributions in P. The I-projection is useful in setting up information geometry , notably because of the following inequality, valid when P is convex: [ 1 ]