Information-Theoretic Analysis of Distributed

Hypothesis Testing for General Sources

Ismaila Salihou Adamou
May 2023

1 Abstract
This seminar will provide a brief presentation on the information-theoretic anal-
ysis of the Distributed Hypothesis Testing (DHT) problem.
In distributed communication networks, data is collected from various re-
mote nodes and sent to a server for further processing. However, in most cases,
the server’s objective is not to reconstruct the original data but rather to make
a decision from the collected data. The DHT problem arises in this context and
it shows connections with the Wyner-Ziv source coding problem. The key fea-
ture of DHT is the ability to make decision directly on the coded data without
reconstructing the original information, based on the statistical distribution of
the data.
In this seminar, I will first provide an information-theoretic analysis of DHT
by presenting our recent results in this area. We consider the simple communi-
cation system where a source X is encoded using side information Y, available
only to the decoder. In this scenario, the decoder aims to make a decision be-
tween two hypotheses: H0 and H1 related to the joint distribution of (X, Y).
While most existing works assumed i.i.d or block i.i.d models for joint distri-
bution of (X, Y), we consider a more generic model, not necessarily stationary
or ergodic. We use information-spectrum tools to derive the achievable error-
exponent for DHT under such generic model. We then investigate two special
cases: (i) non-i.i.d. Gaussian sources, (ii) a Gilbert-Elliot model. Future works
will focus on the design of practical coding schemes for DHT.

2 Biography
Ismaila Salihou Adamou was an intern at ETIS (ENSEA, University Cergy-
Pointoise, CNRS, France) working on the topic related to Nonlinear precoding
for Massive MIMO sub-THz transmissions, from April 2021 to September 2021.
He received the Master degree in Signal, Information, and Telecommunications
from CY Cergy-Paris University and ENSEA, France, in September 2021. Since
December 2021, He is a PhD Student at IMT Atlantique in France, and he is

1
involved in the international chair IoTAD-CEO funded by Cominlabs and IMT
Atlantique. He is working on topics related to information theory for distributed
hypothesis testing and design of multi-user.