Conditioning Strengthens Classical Entropy and Matrix Inequalities: A Submodular Approach
Abstract
Dembo, Cover, and Thomas (1991) developed an elegant information-theoretic framework for proving determinantal inequalities for positive definite matrices, which relies on the structural inequalities of differential entropy. Submodular functions, which subsume entropy, inherently satisfy these structural inequalities because they obey generalized forms of the fundamental properties of entropy -- a chain rule and the property that conditioning reduces the function's value (under an appropriate definition of conditioning). Applying subadditivity, Han's inequality (1978), and partition subadditivity (i.e., subadditivity over a partition) yields Hadamard's, Szász's, and Fischer's inequalities, respectively. Furthermore, this framework recovers Ky Fan's inequality (1955), a strengthening of Hadamard's inequality. We highlight a previously unnoticed information-theoretic insight behind this improvement: conditioning yields a tighter upper bound on the joint entropy than the unconditional one. In this paper, we establish conditional strengthenings of Han's inequality and partition subadditivity in the general setting of submodular functions. We derive equality conditions for these strengthened bounds and characterize when they strictly improve their unconditional counterparts. We specialize these results to differential entropy and apply them to establish strengthened versions of Szász's and Fischer's inequalities. The strengthening of Szász's inequality recovers Ky Fan's inequality as a special case, and is strictly stronger than the classical Szász's inequality for any non-diagonal positive definite matrix. We also derive an inequality concerning eigenvalues, which generalizes and strictly strengthens a corresponding eigenvalue inequality of Ky Fan. We provide numerical examples to explicitly illustrate the tightness of our proposed matrix determinantal bounds.
Related
- Conditioning on Subalgebras - Entropy Duality and Generalized Quantum Stein's Lemma in von Neumann Algebras
- Hermite-Fisher bounds and stability for min-entropy power inequalities
- Majorization, Entropy and Concentration Inequalities for Discrete α-Concave Random Variables
- Improvements of Classical Eigenvalue Inequalities I: Quantitative Hersch-deficit and the Joint Spectral Range on the Two-Sphere
- Sharp Rogers--Shephard Inequalities for Rényi Entropy
BibTeX
@misc{jakhar2026conditioning,
title = {{Conditioning Strengthens Classical Entropy and Matrix Inequalities: A Submodular Approach}},
author = {Gunank Jakhar and Gowtham R. Kurri and Suryajith Chillara and Vinod M. Prabhakaran},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2605.11998},
eprint = {2605.11998},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11998},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Conditioning Strengthens Classical Entropy and Matrix Inequalities: A Submodular Approach
AU - Gunank Jakhar
AU - Gowtham R. Kurri
AU - Suryajith Chillara
AU - Vinod M. Prabhakaran
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/15
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2605.11998
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11998
AB - Dembo, Cover, and Thomas (1991) developed an elegant information-theoretic framework for proving determinantal inequalities for positive definite matrices, which relies on the structural inequalities of differential entropy. Submodular functions, which subsume entropy, inherently satisfy these structural inequalities because they obey generalized forms of the fundamental properties of entropy -- a chain rule and the property that conditioning reduces the function's value (under an appropriate definition of conditioning). Applying subadditivity, Han's inequality (1978), and partition subadditivity (i.e., subadditivity over a partition) yields Hadamard's, Szász's, and Fischer's inequalities, respectively. Furthermore, this framework recovers Ky Fan's inequality (1955), a strengthening of Hadamard's inequality. We highlight a previously unnoticed information-theoretic insight behind this improvement: conditioning yields a tighter upper bound on the joint entropy than the unconditional one. In this paper, we establish conditional strengthenings of Han's inequality and partition subadditivity in the general setting of submodular functions. We derive equality conditions for these strengthened bounds and characterize when they strictly improve their unconditional counterparts. We specialize these results to differential entropy and apply them to establish strengthened versions of Szász's and Fischer's inequalities. The strengthening of Szász's inequality recovers Ky Fan's inequality as a special case, and is strictly stronger than the classical Szász's inequality for any non-diagonal positive definite matrix. We also derive an inequality concerning eigenvalues, which generalizes and strictly strengthens a corresponding eigenvalue inequality of Ky Fan. We provide numerical examples to explicitly illustrate the tightness of our proposed matrix determinantal bounds.
ER -