On the Information Bottleneck Problems: Models, Connections, Applications and Information Theoretic Views

This tutorial paper focuses on the variants of the bottleneck problem taking an information theoretic perspective and discusses practical methods to solve it, as well as its connection to coding and learning aspects. The intimate connections of this setting to remote source-coding under logarithmic loss distortion measure, information combining, common reconstruction, the Wyner–Ahlswede–Korner problem, the efficiency of investment information, as well as, generalization, variational inference, representation learning, autoencoders, and others are highlighted. We discuss its extension to the distributed information bottleneck problem with emphasis on the Gaussian model and highlight the basic connections to the uplink Cloud Radio Access Networks (CRAN) with oblivious processing. For this model, the optimal trade-offs between relevance (i.e., information) and complexity (i.e., rates) in the discrete and vector Gaussian frameworks is determined. In the concluding outlook, some interesting problems are mentioned such as the characterization of the optimal inputs (“features”) distributions under power limitations maximizing the “relevance” for the Gaussian information bottleneck, under “complexity” constraints.