Abstract
Entropy estimation is one of the prototypical problems in distribution property testing. To consistently estimate the Shannon entropy of a distribution on S elements with independent samples, the optimal sample complexity scales sublinearly with S as as shown by Valiant and Valiant [4]. Extending the theory and algorithms for entropy estimation to dependent data, this paper considers the problem of estimating the entropy rate of a stationary reversible Markov chain with S states from a sample path of n observations. We show that •