Jensen-Shannon Divergence

Question

I have another question that I was hoping someone could help me with.

I'm using the Jensen-Shannon-Divergence to measure the similarity between two probability distributions. The similarity scores appear to be correct in the sense that they fall between 1 and 0 given that one uses the base 2 logarithm, with 0 meaning that the distributions are equal.

However, I'm not sure whether there is in fact an error somewhere and was wondering whether someone might be able to say 'yes it's correct' or 'no, you did something wrong'.

Here is the code:

from numpy import zeros, array
from math import sqrt, log


class JSD(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.log2 = log(2)


    def KL_divergence(self, p, q):
        """ Compute KL divergence of two vectors, K(p || q)."""
        return sum(p[x] * log((p[x]) / (q[x])) for x in range(len(p)) if p[x] != 0.0 or p[x] != 0)

    def Jensen_Shannon_divergence(self, p, q):
        """ Returns the Jensen-Shannon divergence. """
        self.JSD = 0.0
        weight = 0.5
        average = zeros(len(p)) #Average
        for x in range(len(p)):
            average[x] = weight * p[x] + (1 - weight) * q[x]
            self.JSD = (weight * self.KL_divergence(array(p), average)) + ((1 - weight) * self.KL_divergence(array(q), average))
        return 1-(self.JSD/sqrt(2 * self.log2))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    J = JSD()
    p = [1.0/10, 9.0/10, 0]
    q = [0, 1.0/10, 9.0/10]
    print J.Jensen_Shannon_divergence(p, q)

The problem is that I feel that the scores are not high enough when comparing two text documents, for instance. However, this is purely a subjective feeling.

Any help is, as always, appreciated.

Answer 1

Note that the scipy entropy call below is the Kullback-Leibler divergence.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jensen%E2%80%93Shannon_divergence

#!/usr/bin/env python
from scipy.stats import entropy
from numpy.linalg import norm
import numpy as np

def JSD(P, Q):
    _P = P / norm(P, ord=1)
    _Q = Q / norm(Q, ord=1)
    _M = 0.5 * (_P + _Q)
    return 0.5 * (entropy(_P, _M) + entropy(_Q, _M))

Also note that the test case in the Question looks erred?? The sum of the p distribution does not add to 1.0.

See: http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/eda/section3/eda361.htm

Answer 2

Since the Jensen-Shannon distance (distance.jensenshannon) has been included in Scipy 1.2, the Jensen-Shannon divergence can be obtained as the square of the Jensen-Shannon distance:

from scipy.spatial import distance

distance.jensenshannon([1.0/10, 9.0/10, 0], [0, 1.0/10, 9.0/10]) ** 2
# 0.5306056938642212

Answer 3

Get some data for distributions with known divergence and compare your results against those known values.

BTW: the sum in KL_divergence may be rewritten using the zip built-in function like this:

sum(_p * log(_p / _q) for _p, _q in zip(p, q) if _p != 0)

This does away with lots of "noise" and is also much more "pythonic". The double comparison with 0.0 and 0 is not necessary.