A Unified MDL-based Binning and Tensor Factorization Framework for PDF Estimation

Reliable density estimation is fundamental for numerous applications in statistics and machine learning. In many practical scenarios, data are best modeled as mixtures of component densities that capture complex and multimodal patterns. However, conventional density estimators based on uniform histograms often fail to capture local variations, especially when the underlying distribution is highly nonuniform. Furthermore, the inherent discontinuity of histograms poses challenges for tasks requiring smooth derivatives, such as gradient-based optimization, clustering, and nonparametric discriminant analysis. In this work, we present a novel non-parametric approach for multivariate probability density function (PDF) estimation that utilizes minimum description length (MDL)-based binning with quantile cuts. Our approach builds upon tensor factorization techniques, leveraging the canonical polyadic decomposition (CPD) of a joint probability tensor. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on synthetic data and a challenging real dry bean classification dataset.

@article{musab2025_2504.18686,
  title={ A Unified MDL-based Binning and Tensor Factorization Framework for PDF Estimation },
  author={ Mustafa Musab and Joseph K. Chege and Arie Yeredor and Martin Haardt },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.18686},
  year={ 2025 }
}