  Information theoretic measures (e.g. the Kullback Liebler divergence and
Shannon mutual information) have been used for exploring possibly nonlinear
multivariate dependencies in high dimension. If these dependencies are assumed
to follow a Markov factor graph model, this exploration process is called
structure discovery. For discrete-valued samples, estimates of the information
divergence over the parametric class of multinomial models lead to structure
discovery methods whose mean squared error achieves parametric convergence
rates as the sample size grows. However, a naive application of this method to
continuous nonparametric multivariate models converges much more slowly. In
this paper we introduce a new method for nonparametric structure discovery that
uses weighted ensemble divergence estimators that achieve parametric
convergence rates and obey an asymptotic central limit theorem that facilitates
hypothesis testing and other types of statistical validation.
