Distributed information-theoretic biclustering

International audienceThis paper investigates the problem of distributed biclustering of memoryless sources and extends previous work [1] to the general case with more than two sources. Given a set of distributed stationary memoryless sources, the encoders' goal is to find rate-limited representations of these sources such that the mutual information between two selected subsets of descriptions (each of them generated by distinct encoders) is maximized. This formulation is fundamentally different from conventional distributed source coding problems since here redundancy among descriptions should actually be maximally preserved. We derive non-trivial outer and inner bounds to the achievable region for this problem and further connect them to the CEO problem under logarithmic loss distortion. Since information-theoretic biclustering is closely related to distributed hypothesis testing against independence, our results are also expected to apply to that problem