arXiv · 2607.18425
Mutual Information second order expansion is the Pearson's chi-square statistic
Abstract
We show that MI connects subtly and elegantly the two best-known state-of-the-art independence test statistics: the $G^2$ and the Pearson's chi-square statistic $\chi^2$. Furthermore, we show that the MI connects directly those statistics by an elegant formula arising from a stochastic Taylor expansion of MI ($\delta$-method). MI second order term is precisely $\chi^2$ up to a scale factor. As a consequence, by this connection, the difference between $G^2$ and $\chi^2$ can be explicitly quantified.
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Marius Marinescu. 2026-07-20. Mutual Information second order expansion is the Pearson's chi-square statistic. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18425
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