The Gibbs distribution of statistical physics is an exponential family of probability distributions, which has a mathematical basis of duality in the form of the Legendre transformation. Recent studies of complex systems have found lots of distributions obeying the power law rather than the standard Gibbs type distributions. The Tsallis q-entropy is a typical example capturing such phenomena. We treat the q-Gibbs distribution or the q-exponential family by generalizing the exponential function to the q-family of power functions, which is useful for studying various complex or non-standard physical phenomena. We give a new mathematical structure to the q-exponential family different from those previously given. It has a dually flat geometrical structure derived from the Legendre transformation and the conformal geometry is useful for understanding it. The q-version of the maximum entropy theorem is naturally induced from the q-Pythagorean theorem. We also show that the maximizer of the q-escort distribution is a Bayesian MAP (Maximum A posteriori Probability) estimator.

We discuss a special class of generalized divergence measures by the use of generator functions. Any divergence measure in the class is separated into the difference between cross and diagonal entropy. The diagonal entropy measure in the class associates with a model of maximum entropy distributions; the divergence measure leads to statistical estimation via minimization, for arbitrarily giving a statistical model. The dualistic relationship between the maximum entropy model and the minimum divergence estimation is explored in the framework of information geometry. The model of maximum entropy distributions is characterized to be totally geodesic with respect to the linear connection associated with the divergence. A natural extension for the classical theory for the maximum likelihood method under the maximum entropy model in terms of the Boltzmann-Gibbs-Shannon entropy is given. We discuss the duality in detail for Tsallis entropy as a typical example.

Recent progress of theories and applications regarding statistical models with generalized exponential functions in statistical science is giving an impact on the movement to deform the standard structure of information geometry. For this purpose, various representing functions are playing central roles. In this paper, we consider two important notions in information geometry, i.e., invariance and dual flatness, from a viewpoint of representing functions. We first characterize a pair of representing functions that realizes the invariant geometry by solving a system of ordinary differential equations. Next, by proposing a new transformation technique, i.e., conformal flattening, we construct dually flat geometries from a certain class of non-flat geometries. Finally, we apply the results to demonstrate several properties of gradient flows on the probability simplex.

We demonstrate that the q-exponential family particularly admits natural geometrical structures among deformed exponential families. The property is the invariance of structures with respect to a general linear group, which transitively acts on the space of positive definite matrices. We prove this property via the correspondence between information geometry induced by a deformed potential on the space and the one induced by what we call β-divergence defined on the q-exponential family with q = β + 1. The results are fundamental in robust multivariate analysis using the q-Gaussian family.