Maximum Likelihood and the Information Bottleneck

The information bottleneck (IB) method is an information-theoretic formulation, this method constructs for clustering problems. Given a joint distribution a new variable that are informative . Maximum likelihood (ML) of mixture models is a standard statistical about approach to clustering problems. In this paper, we ask: how are the two methods related? We define a simple mapping between the IB problem and the ML prob- lem for the multinomial mixture model.