A novel distance metric: Generalized relative entropy

Abstract

Information entropy and its extension, which are important generalizations of entropy, are currently applied to many research domains. In this paper, a novel generalized relative entropy is constructed to avoid some defects of traditional relative entropy. We present the structure of generalized relative entropy after the discussion of defects in relative entropy. Moreover, some properties of the provided generalized relative entropy are presented and proved. The provided generalized relative entropy is proved to have a finite range and is a finite distance metric. Finally, we predict nucleosome positioning of fly and yeast based on generalized relative entropy and relative entropy respectively. The experimental results show that the properties of generalized relative entropy are better than relative entropy.