Fano's inequality is one of the most elementary, ubiquitous, and important
tools in information theory. Using majorization theory, Fano's inequality is
generalized to a broad class of information measures, which contains those of
Shannon and R\'{e}nyi. When specialized to these measures, it recovers and
generalizes the classical inequalities. Key to the derivation is the
construction of an appropriate conditional distribution inducing a desired
marginal distribution on a countably infinite alphabet. The construction is
based on the infinite-dimensional version of Birkhoff's theorem proven by
R\'{e}v\'{e}sz [Acta Math. Hungar. 1962, 3, 188{\textendash}198], and the
constraint of maintaining a desired marginal distribution is similar to
coupling in probability theory. Using our Fano-type inequalities for Shannon's
and R\'{e}nyi's information measures, we also investigate the asymptotic
behavior of the sequence of Shannon's and R\'{e}nyi's equivocations when the
error probabilities vanish. This asymptotic behavior provides a novel
characterization of the asymptotic equipartition property (AEP) via Fano's
inequality.Comment: 44 pages, 3 figure