Game theory, maximum generalized entropy, minimum discrepancy, robust Bayes and Pythagoras

Suppose that, for purposes of inductive inference or choosing an optimal decision, we wish to select a single distribution P* to act as representative of a class /spl Gamma/ of such distributions. The maximum entropy principle ("MaxeEnt") (Jaynes 1989; Csiszar 1991) is widely applied for this purpose, but its rationale has often been controversial (Shimony 1985; Seidenfeld 1986). Here we emphasize and generalize a reinterpretation of the maximum entropy principle (Topsoe (1979); Walley (1991); Grunwald (1998)): that the distribution P* that maximizes the entropy over /spl Gamma/ also minimizes the worst-case expected logarithmic score (log loss). In the terminology of decision theory (Berger 1985), P* is a robust Bayes, or /spl Gamma/-minimax, act, when loss is measured by the log loss. This gives a decision-theoretic justification for maximum entropy.