  In signal analysis and synthesis, linear approximation theory considers a
linear decomposition of any given signal in a set of atoms, collected into a
so-called dictionary. Relevant sparse representations are obtained by relaxing
the orthogonality condition of the atoms, yielding overcomplete dictionaries
with an extended number of atoms. More generally than the linear decomposition,
overcomplete kernel dictionaries provide an elegant nonlinear extension by
defining the atoms through a mapping kernel function (e.g., the gaussian
kernel). Models based on such kernel dictionaries are used in neural networks,
gaussian processes and online learning with kernels.
  The quality of an overcomplete dictionary is evaluated with a diversity
measure the distance, the approximation, the coherence and the Babel measures.
In this paper, we develop a framework to examine overcomplete kernel
dictionaries with the entropy from information theory. Indeed, a higher value
of the entropy is associated to a further uniform spread of the atoms over the
space. For each of the aforementioned diversity measures, we derive lower
bounds on the entropy. Several definitions of the entropy are examined, with an
extensive analysis in both the input space and the mapped feature space.
