# Calculating KL Divergence in Python

I am rather new to this and can't say I have a complete understanding of the theoretical concepts behind this. I am trying to calculate the KL Divergence between several lists of points in Python. I am using http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.mutual_info_score.html to try and do this. The problem that I'm running into is that the value returned is the same for any 2 lists of numbers (its 1.3862943611198906). I have a feeling that I'm making some sort of theoretical mistake here but can't spot it.

values1 = [1.346112,1.337432,1.246655]
values2 = [1.033836,1.082015,1.117323]
metrics.mutual_info_score(values1,values2)


That is an example of what I'm running - just that I'm getting the same output for any 2 input. Any advice/help would be appreciated!

• By KL, do you mean Kullback-Leibler divergence? – Dawny33 Dec 8 '15 at 10:55
• Yes, exactly that! – Nanda Dec 8 '15 at 10:57
• By running sklearn.metrics.mutual_info_score([1.346112,1.337432,1.246655], [1.033836,1.082015,1.117323]), I get the value 1.0986122886681096. – Dawny33 Dec 8 '15 at 11:05
• Sorry, i was using values1 as [1, 1.346112,1.337432,1.246655] and values2 as values2 as [1,1.033836,1.082015,1.117323] and hence the difference value. – Nanda Dec 8 '15 at 11:07

First of all, sklearn.metrics.mutual_info_score implements mutual information for evaluating clustering results, not pure Kullback-Leibler divergence!

This is equal to the Kullback-Leibler divergence of the joint distribution with the product distribution of the marginals.

KL divergence (and any other such measure) expects the input data to have a sum of 1. Otherwise, they are not proper probability distributions. If your data does not have a sum of 1, most likely it is usually not proper to use KL divergence! (In some cases, it may be admissible to have a sum of less than 1, e.g. in the case of missing data.)

Also note that it is common to use base 2 logarithms. This only yields a constant scaling factor in difference, but base 2 logarithms are easier to interpret and have a more intuitive scale (0 to 1 instead of 0 to log2=0.69314..., measuring the information in bits instead of nats).

> sklearn.metrics.mutual_info_score([0,1],[1,0])
0.69314718055994529


as we can clearly see, the MI result of sklearn is scaled using natural logarithms instead of log2. This is an unfortunate choice, as explained above.

Kullback-Leibler divergence is fragile, unfortunately. On above example it is not well-defined: KL([0,1],[1,0]) causes a division by zero, and tends to infinity. It is also asymmetric.

Scipy's entropy function will calculate KL divergence if feed two vectors p and q, each representing a probability distribution. If the two vectors aren't pdfs, it will normalize then first.

Mutual information is related to, but not the same as KL Divergence.

"This weighted mutual information is a form of weighted KL-Divergence, which is known to take negative values for some inputs, and there are examples where the weighted mutual information also takes negative values"

I'm not sure with the ScikitLearn implementation, but here is a quick implementation of the KL divergence in Python:

import numpy as np

def KL(a, b):
a = np.asarray(a, dtype=np.float)
b = np.asarray(b, dtype=np.float)

return np.sum(np.where(a != 0, a * np.log(a / b), 0))

values1 = [1.346112,1.337432,1.246655]
values2 = [1.033836,1.082015,1.117323]

print KL(values1, values2)


Output: 0.775279624079

There might be conflict of implementation in some libraries, so make sure you read their docs before using.

• I tried this too but this was returning negative values which, I think, is not a valid value. A little bit of research then got me to this result mathoverflow.net/questions/43849/… which talks about how the input has to be a probability distribution. Guess that is where I made my mistake. – Nanda Dec 8 '15 at 11:11
• @Nanda Thanks for the link. Mine returns 0.775279624079 for your inputs and the sklearn metrics return 1.3862943611198906. Confused still! But, seems like including those value checks according to the qn, into the script should do :) – Dawny33 Dec 8 '15 at 11:14
• I know what you mean! I have tried 3 different functions to get 3 different values with the only thing common between them being that the result didn't "feel" right. The input values is definitely a logical error so changing my approach altogether! – Nanda Dec 8 '15 at 11:25
• @Nanda Ahh, that's clear now :) Thanks for explaining – Dawny33 Dec 8 '15 at 11:27

This trick avoids conditional code and may therefore provide better performance.

import numpy as np

def KL(P,Q):
""" Epsilon is used here to avoid conditional code for
checking that neither P nor Q is equal to 0. """
epsilon = 0.00001

# You may want to instead make copies to avoid changing the np arrays.
P = P+epsilon
Q = Q+epsilon

divergence = np.sum(P*np.log(P/Q))
return divergence

# Should be normalized though
values1 = np.asarray([1.346112,1.337432,1.246655])
values2 = np.asarray([1.033836,1.082015,1.117323])

# Note slight difference in the final result compared to Dawny33
print KL(values1, values2) # 0.775278939433

• Nice trick! I'd be interested to see how this compares with the other solution on a time benchmark. – surelyourejoking May 21 '18 at 9:41

Consider the three following samples from a distribution(s).

values1 = np.asarray([1.3,1.3,1.2])
values2 = np.asarray([1.0,1.1,1.1])
values3 = np.array([1.8,0.7,1.7])


Clearly, values1 and values2 are closer, so we expect the measure of surprise or entropy, to be lower when compared to values3.

from scipy.stats import entropy
print("\nIndividual Entropy\n")
print(entropy(values1))
print(entropy(values2))
print(entropy(values3))

print("\nPairwise Kullback Leibler divergence\n")
print(entropy(values1, qk=values2))
print(entropy(values1, qk=values3))
print(entropy(values2, qk=values3))


We see the following output:

Individual Entropy

1.097913446793334
1.0976250611902076
1.0278436769863724 #<--- this one had the lowest, but doesn't mean much.

Pairwise Kullback Leibler divergence

0.002533297351606588
0.09053972625203921 #<-- makes sense
0.09397968199352116 #<-- makes sense


We see this makes sense because the values between values1 and values3 and values 2 and values 3 are simply more drastic in change than values1 to values 2. This is my validation to understanding KL-D and the packages that can be leveraged for it.