Representation of mutual information via input estimates

A relationship between information theory and estimation theory was recently shown for the Gaussian channel, relating the derivative of mutual information with the minimum mean-square error. This paper generalizes the link between information theory and estimation theory to arbitrary channels, giving representations of the derivative of mutual information as a function of the conditional marginal input distributions given the outputs. We illustrate the use of this representation in the efficient numerical computation of the mutual information achieved by inputs such as specific codes or natural language.