"We study tail probabilities via some Gaussian approximations. Our results make refinements to large deviation theory. The proof builds on classical results by Bahadur and Rao. Binomial distributions and their tail probabilities are discussed in more detail."

"We discuss some recently visited positions towards dealing with nonequilibria from the
mathematical point of view of Markov networks."

"We show that the thermal subadditivity of entropy provides a common basis to derive a strong form of the bounded dierence inequality and related results as well as more recent inequalities applicable to convex Lipschitz functions, random symmetric matrices, shortest travelling sales-men paths and weakly self-bounding functions. We also give two new concentration inequalities."

Terry Tao discusses the work of the four 2010 Fields medal winners.

"We show that an arbitrary probability distribution can be represented in an exponential form. In physical contexts, this implies that the equilibrium distribution of any classical or quantum dynamical system is expressible in a grand canonical form." Is there anything really new here, though? ETA: No, cf. Barron and Sheu.

"We recently proved that game theory and statistical physics are identical when cast in terms of information theory.

We call the associated formalism Probability Collectives (PC). PC opens many new lines of research, and provides new approaches to problems in distributed control and distributed optimization."

Authors: Aernout van Enter, Evgeny Verbitskiy

Neri Merhav

lecture notes by Amir Dembo, Andrea Montanari

"We consider the problem of learning the structure of Ising models (pairwise binary Markov random fields) from i.i.d. samples. While several methods have been proposed to accomplish this task, their relative merits and limitations remain somewhat obscure. By analyzing a number of concrete examples, we show that low-complexity algorithms systematically fail when the Markov random field develops long-range correlations. More precisely, this phenomenon appears to be related to the Ising model phase transition (although it does not coincide with it)."

Pierre Del Moral, Arnaud Doucet, Sumeetpal S. Singh

(by Krishna R. Narayanan, Arun R. Srinivasa) Even though one of the references is B. Roy Frieden's execrable attempt to "derive" physics from Fisher's information, the information theory in this paper is definitely interesting.

Neri Merhav

by Neri Merhav, Dongning Guo, Shlomo Shamai

by Neri Merhav