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Approximate Discrete Entropy Monotonicity for Log-Concave Sums

Probability 2023-10-19 v2 Information Theory Combinatorics math.IT

Abstract

It is proven that a conjecture of Tao (2010) holds true for log-concave random variables on the integers: For every n1n \geq 1, if X1,,XnX_1,\ldots,X_n are i.i.d. integer-valued, log-concave random variables, then H(X1++Xn+1)H(X1++Xn)+12log(n+1n)o(1) H(X_1+\cdots+X_{n+1}) \geq H(X_1+\cdots+X_{n}) + \frac{1}{2}\log{\Bigl(\frac{n+1}{n}\Bigr)} - o(1) as H(X1)H(X_1) \to \infty, where HH denotes the (discrete) Shannon entropy. The problem is reduced to the continuous setting by showing that if U1,,UnU_1,\ldots,U_n are independent continuous uniforms on (0,1)(0,1), then h(X1++Xn+U1++Un)=H(X1++Xn)+o(1) h(X_1+\cdots+X_n + U_1+\cdots+U_n) = H(X_1+\cdots+X_n) + o(1) as H(X1)H(X_1) \to \infty, where hh stands for the differential entropy. Explicit bounds for the o(1)o(1)-terms are provided.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2210.06624,
  title  = {Approximate Discrete Entropy Monotonicity for Log-Concave Sums},
  author = {Lampros Gavalakis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.06624},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

15 pages, no figures. A number of typos have been fixed and reviewers' comments have been incorporated. More details have been added in most of the proofs. To appear in Combinatorics, Probability and Computing

R2 v1 2026-06-28T03:29:53.935Z