Our aim is to provide a short and self contained synthesis which generalise and unify various related and unrelated works involving what we call Phi-Sobolev functional inequalities. Such inequalities related to Phi-entropies can be seen in particular as an inclusive interpolation between Poincare and Gross logarithmic Sobolev inequalities. In addition to the known material, extensions are provided and improvements are given for some aspects. Stability by tensor products, convolution, and bounded perturbations are addressed. We show that under simple convexity assumptions on Phi, such inequalities hold in a lot of situations, including hyper-contractive diffusions, uniformly strictly log-concave measures, Wiener measure (paths space of Brownian Motion on Riemannian Manifolds) and generic Poisson space (includes paths space of some pure jumps Levy processes and related infinitely divisible laws). Proofs are simple and relies essentially on convexity. We end up by a short parallel inspired by the analogy with Boltzmann-Shannon entropy appearing in Kinetic Gases and Information Theories.
We introduce a class of generalized relative entropies (inspired by the Bregman divergence in information theory) on the Wasserstein space over a weighted Riemannian or Finsler manifold. We prove that the convexity of all the entropies in this class is equivalent to the combination of the nonnegative weighted Ricci curvature and the convexity of another weight function used in the definition of the generalized relative entropies. This convexity condition corresponds to Lott and Villani's version of the curvature-dimension condition. As applications, we obtain appropriate variants of the Talagr…
We investigate the $m$-relative entropy, which stems from the Bregman divergence, on weighted Riemannian and Finsler manifolds. We prove that the displacement $K$-convexity of the $m$-relative entropy is equivalent to the combination of the nonnegativity of the weighted Ricci curvature and the $K$-convexity of the weight function. We use this to show appropriate variants of the Talagrand, HWI and the logarithmic Sobolev inequalities, as well as the concentration of measures. We also prove that the gradient flow of the $m$-relative entropy produces a solution to the porous medium equation or th…
We introduce the notion of an interpolating path on the set of probability measures on finite graphs. Using this notion, we first prove a displacement convexity property of entropy along such a path and derive Prekopa-Leindler type inequalities, a Talagrand transport-entropy inequality, certain HWI type as well as log-Sobolev type inequalities in discrete settings. To illustrate through examples, we apply our results to the complete graph and to the hypercube for which our results are optimal -- by passing to the limit, we recover the classical log-Sobolev inequality for the standard Gaussian …
This is a continuation of our previous work 0712.4092. It is well known that various isoperimetric inequalities imply their functional ``counterparts'', but in general this is not an equivalence. We show that under certain convexity assumptions (e.g. for log-concave probability measures in Euclidean space), the latter implication can in fact be reversed for very general inequalities, generalizing a reverse form of Cheeger's inequality due to Buser and Ledoux. We develop a coherent single framework for passing between isoperimetric inequalities, Orlicz-Sobolev functional inequalities and capaci…
The concept of weighted entropy takes into account values of different outcomes, i.e., makes entropy context-dependent, through the weight function. In this paper, we establish a number of simple inequalities for the weighted entropies (general as well as specific), mirroring similar bounds on standard (Shannon) entropies and related quantities. The required assumptions are written in terms of various expectations of the weight functions. Examples are weighted Ky Fan and weighted Hadamard inequalities involving determinants of positive-definite matrices, and weighted Cramér-Rao inequalities in…
This note contains sufficient conditions for the probability density function of an arbitrary continuous univariate distribution, supported on $(0,\infty),$ such that the corresponding Mills ratio to be reciprocally convex (concave). To illustrate the applications of the main results, the reciprocal convexity (concavity) of Mills ratio of the gamma distribution is discussed in details.
Discrete convex Sobolev inequalities and Beckner inequalities are derived for time-continuous Markov chains on finite state spaces. Beckner inequalities interpolate between the modified logarithmic Sobolev inequality and the Poincaré inequality. Their proof is based on the Bakry-Emery approach and on discrete Bochner-type inequalities established by Caputo, Dai Pra, and Posta and recently extended by Fathi and Maas for logarithmic entropies. The abstract result for convex entropies is applied to several Markov chains, including birth-death processes, zero-range processes, Bernoulli-Laplace mod…
We derive new characterisations of the matrix $\mathrmΦ$-entropy functionals introduced in [Electron.~J.~Probab., 19(20): 1--30, 2014]. Notably, all known equivalent characterisations of the classical $Φ$-entropies have their matrix correspondences. Next, we propose an operator-valued generalisation of the matrix $Φ$-entropy functionals, and prove their subadditivity under Löwner partial ordering. Our results demonstrate that the subadditivity of operator-valued $Φ$-entropies is equivalent to the convexity of various related functions. This result can be used to demonstrate an interesting resu…
We define, in the frame of an abstract Wiener space, the notions of convexity and of concavity for the equivalence classes of random variables. As application we show that some important inequalities of the finite dimensional case have their natural counterparts in this setting.
This paper provides rates of convergence for empirical (generalised) barycenters on compact geodesic metric spaces under general conditions using empirical processes techniques. Our main assumption is termed a variance inequality and provides a strong connection between usual assumptions in the field of empirical processes and central concepts of metric geometry. We study the validity of variance inequalities in spaces of non-positive and non-negative Aleksandrov curvature. In this last scenario, we show that variance inequalities hold provided geodesics, emanating from a barycenter, can be ex…
We show that two essentially conditional linear inequalities for Shannon's entropies (including the Zhang-Yeung'97 conditional inequality) do not hold for asymptotically entropic points. This means that these inequalities are non-robust in a very strong sense. This result raises the question of the meaning of these inequalities and the validity of their use in practice-oriented applications.
Shearer's inequality bounds the sum of joint entropies of random variables in terms of the total joint entropy. We give another lower bound for the same sum in terms of the individual entropies when the variables are functions of independent random seeds. The inequality involves a constant characterizing the expansion properties of the system. Our results generalize to entropy inequalities used in recent work in invariant settings, including the edge-vertex inequality for factor-of-IID processes, Bowen's entropy inequalities, and Bollobás's entropy bounds in random regular graphs. The proof me…
In the study of Markovian processes, one of the principal achievements is the equivalence between the $Φ$-Sobolev inequalities and an exponential decrease of the $Φ$-entropies. In this work, we develop a framework of Markov semigroups on matrix-valued functions and generalize the above equivalence to the exponential decay of matrix $Φ$-entropies. This result also specializes to spectral gap inequalities and modified logarithmic Sobolev inequalities in the random matrix setting. To establish the main result, we define a non-commutative generalization of the carré du champ operator, and prove a …
We study conditional linear information inequalities, i.e., linear inequalities for Shannon entropy that hold for distributions whose entropies meet some linear constraints. We prove that some conditional information inequalities cannot be extended to any unconditional linear inequalities. Some of these conditional inequalities hold for almost entropic points, while others do not. We also discuss some counterparts of conditional information inequalities for Kolmogorov complexity.
Lower bounds for the Rényi entropies of sums of independent random variables taking values in cyclic groups of prime order under permutations are established. The main ingredients of our approach are extended rearrangement inequalities in prime cyclic groups building on Lev (2001), and notions of stochastic ordering. Several applications are developed, including to discrete entropy power inequalities, the Littlewood-Offord problem, and counting solutions of certain linear systems.
