Entropy-variance inequalities for discrete log-concave random variables via degree of freedom

Abstract: We utilize a discrete version of the notion of degree of freedom to prove a sharp min-entropy-variance inequality for integer valued log-concave random variables. More specifically, we show that the geometric distribution minimizes the min-entropy within the class of log-concave probability sequences with fixed variance. As an application, we obtain a discrete R\'enyi entropy power inequality in the log-concave case, which improves a result of Bobkov, Marsiglietti and Melbourne (2022).