Information Bottleneck

Optimal compression tradeoff on the information plane

Controls

I(X;Y) = —
I(T;X) = —
I(T;Y) = —
The Information Bottleneck tradeoff:
min I(T;X) − β·I(T;Y)

Each point on the curve corresponds to one β. The curve traces from (0,0) (no info) to (H(X), I(X;Y)) (full info). The bottleneck is how much of X can be discarded while retaining I(T;Y).

Tishby et al. (1999).