On the monotonicity of discrete entropy for log-concave random vectors on $\mathbb{Z}^d$

Abstract

We prove the following type of discrete entropy monotonicity for sums of isotropic, log-concave, independent and identically distributed random vectors $X_1,\dots,X_{n+1}$ on $\mathbb{Z}^d$: $$ H(X_1+\cdots+X_{n+1}) \geq H(X_1+\cdots+X_{n}) + \frac{d}{2}\log{\Bigl(\frac{n+1}{n}\Bigr)} +o(1), $$ where $o(1)$ vanishes as $H(X_1) \to \infty$. Moreover, for the $o(1)$-term, we obtain a rate of convergence $ O\Bigl({H(X_1)}{e^{-\frac{1}{d}H(X_1)}}\Bigr)$, where the implied constants depend on $d$ and $n$. This generalizes to $\mathbb{Z}^d$ the one-dimensional result of the second named author (2023). As in dimension one, our strategy is to establish that the discrete entropy $H(X_1+\cdots+X_{n})$ is close to the differential (continuous) entropy $h(X_1+U_1+\cdots+X_{n}+U_{n})$, where $U_1,\dots, U_n$ are independent and identically distributed uniform random vectors on $[0,1]^d$ and to apply the theorem of Artstein, Ball, Barthe and Naor (2004) on the monotonicity of differential entropy. In fact, we show this result under more general assumptions than log-concavity, which are preserved up to constants under convolution. In order to show that log-concave distributions satisfy our assumptions in dimension $d\ge2$, more involved tools from convex geometry are needed because a suitable position is required. We show that, for a log-concave function on $\mathbb{R}^d$ in isotropic position, its integral, barycenter and covariance matrix are close to their discrete counterparts. Moreover, in the log-concave case, we weaken the isotropicity assumption to what we call almost isotropicity. One of our technical tools is a discrete analogue to the upper bound on the isotropic constant of a log-concave function, which extends to dimensions $d\ge1$ a result of Bobkov, Marsiglietti and Melbourne (2022).