The Entropy Influence Conjecture Revisited

In this paper, we prove that most of the boolean functions, $f : \{-1,1\}^n \rightarrow \{-1,1\}$ satisfy the Fourier Entropy Influence (FEI) Conjecture due to Friedgut and Kalai (Proc. AMS'96). The conjecture says that the Entropy of a boolean function is at most a constant times the Influence of the function. The conjecture has been proven for families of functions of smaller sizes. O'donnell, Wright and Zhou (ICALP'11) verified the conjecture for the family of symmetric functions, whose size is $2^{n+1}$. They are in fact able to prove the conjecture for the family of $d$-part symmetric functions for constant $d$, the size of whose is $2^{O(n^d)}$. Also it is known that the conjecture is true for a large fraction of polynomial sized DNFs (COLT'10). Using elementary methods we prove that a random function with high probability satisfies the conjecture with the constant as $(2 + \delta)$, for any constant $\delta > 0$.Comment: We thank Kunal Dutta and Justin Salez for pointing out that our result can be extended to a high probability statemen

A Lower Bound on the Constant in the Fourier Min-Entropy/Influence Conjecture

We describe a new construction of Boolean functions. A specific instance of our construction provides a 30-variable Boolean function having min-entropy/influence ratio to be $128/45 \approx 2.8444$ which is presently the highest known value of this ratio that is achieved by any Boolean function. Correspondingly, $128/45$ is also presently the best known lower bound on the universal constant of the Fourier min-entropy/influence conjecture

{Improved Bounds on Fourier Entropy and Min-entropy}

Given a Boolean function $f:\{-1,1\}^n\to \{-1,1\}$, the Fourier distribution assigns probability $\widehat{f}(S)^2$ to $S\subseteq [n]$. The Fourier Entropy-Influence (FEI) conjecture of Friedgut and Kalai asks if there exist a universal constant C>0 such that $H(\hat{f}^2)\leq C Inf(f)$, where $H(\hat{f}^2)$ is the Shannon entropy of the Fourier distribution of $f$ and $Inf(f)$ is the total influence of $f$. 1) We consider the weaker Fourier Min-entropy-Influence (FMEI) conjecture. This asks if $H_{\infty}(\hat{f}^2)\leq C Inf(f)$, where $H_{\infty}(\hat{f}^2)$ is the min-entropy of the Fourier distribution. We show $H_{\infty}(\hat{f}^2)\leq 2C_{\min}^\oplus(f)$, where $C_{\min}^\oplus(f)$ is the minimum parity certificate complexity of $f$. We also show that for every $\epsilon\geq 0$, we have $H_{\infty}(\hat{f}^2)\leq 2\log (\|\hat{f}\|_{1,\epsilon}/(1-\epsilon))$, where $\|\hat{f}\|_{1,\epsilon}$ is the approximate spectral norm of $f$. As a corollary, we verify the FMEI conjecture for the class of read-$k$ $DNF$s (for constant $k$). 2) We show that $H(\hat{f}^2)\leq 2 aUC^\oplus(f)$, where $aUC^\oplus(f)$ is the average unambiguous parity certificate complexity of $f$. This improves upon Chakraborty et al. An important consequence of the FEI conjecture is the long-standing Mansour's conjecture. We show that a weaker version of FEI already implies Mansour's conjecture: is $H(\hat{f}^2)\leq C \min\{C^0(f),C^1(f)\}$?, where $C^0(f), C^1(f)$ are the 0- and 1-certificate complexities of $f$, respectively. 3) We study what FEI implies about the structure of polynomials that 1/3-approximate a Boolean function. We pose a conjecture (which is implied by FEI): no "flat" degree-$d$ polynomial of sparsity $2^{\omega(d)}$ can 1/3-approximate a Boolean function. We prove this conjecture unconditionally for a particular class of polynomials