Tight Bounds Between the Jensen–Shannon Divergence and the Minmax Divergence

Motivated by questions arising at the intersection of information theory and geometry, we compare two dissimilarity measures between finite categorical distributions. One is the well-known Jensen-Shannon divergence, which is easy to compute and whose square root is a proper metric. The other is what we call the minmax divergence, which is harder to compute. Just like the Jensen-Shannon divergence, it arises naturally from the Kullback-Leibler divergence. The main contribution of this paper is a proof showing that the minmax divergence can be tightly approximated by the Jensen-Shannon divergence. The bounds suggest that the square root of the minmax divergence is a metric, and we prove that this is indeed true in the one-dimensional case. The general case remains open. Finally, we consider analogous questions in the context of another Bregman divergence and the corresponding Burbea-Rao (Jensen-Bregman) divergence.