• Journal of the Korean Statistical Society
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.131-146
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• 1997

In this paper the problem of measuring the stochastic dependence among sets fo random variates is considered, and attention is specifically directed to forming a single well-defined measure of the dependence among sets of normal variates. A new information theoretic measure of the dependence called dependence index (DI) is introduced and its several properties are studied. The development of DI is based on the generalization and normalization of the mutual information introduced by Kullback(1968). For data analysis, minimum cross entropy estimator of DI is suggested, and its asymptotic distribution is obtained for testing the existence of the dependence. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate the performance of the estimator, and show that is is useful not only for evaluation of the dependence, but also for independent model testing.