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The University of Southampton
Economic, Social and Political Sciences

A Test for the Two-Sample Problem using Mutual Information to Fix Information Leak in e-Passports Seminar

Origin: 
Social Statistics and Demography
Time:
15:45
Date:
10 March 2011
Venue:
Room 4003, Building 4 Highfield Campus

For more information regarding this seminar, please telephone Social Statistics & Demography on +44 (0)23 8059 4547 or email socstats@soton.ac.uk .

Event details

Statistics Research Thursday Seminar Series

For two independently drawn samples from continuous distributions, a statistical test based on the mutual information statistic is proposed for the null hypothesis that both samples originate from the same population. We demonstrated through simulation that this test is more powerful than the commonly used nonparametric tests in many situations.

As an application we discuss the information leak of e-passports. Using the mutual information based tests, we show that it is possible to trace a passport by comparing the time taken to respond to a recorded message. We show that the mutual information based test detects a leak in a situation where the other non-parametric tests fail.

This is a joint work with Tom Chothia, University of Birmingham.

Speaker information

Apratim Guha,University of Birmingham

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