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Improved Bounds on Fourier Entropy and Min-Entropy Arunachalam, Srinivasan Chakraborty, Sourav Koucký, Michal Saurabh, Nitin de Wolf, Ronald Fourier analysis of Boolean functions FEI conjecture query complexity polynomial approximation approximate degree certificate complexity Given a Boolean function f:{-1,1}ⁿ→ {-1,1}, define the Fourier distribution to be the distribution on subsets of [n], where each S ⊆ [n] is sampled with probability f̂(S)². The Fourier Entropy-Influence (FEI) conjecture of Friedgut and Kalai [E. Friedgut and G. Kalai, 1996] seeks to relate two fundamental measures associated with the Fourier distribution: does there exist a universal constant C>0 such that ℍ(f̂²)≤ C⋅ Inf(f), where ℍ(f̂²) is the Shannon entropy of the Fourier distribution of f and Inf(f) is the total influence of f? In this paper we present three new contributions towards the FEI conjecture: ii) Our first contribution shows that ℍ(f̂²) ≤ 2⋅ aUC^⊕(f), where aUC^⊕(f) is the average unambiguous parity-certificate complexity of f. This improves upon several bounds shown by Chakraborty et al. [S. Chakraborty et al., 2016]. We further improve this bound for unambiguous DNFs. iii) We next consider the weaker Fourier Min-entropy-Influence (FMEI) conjecture posed by O'Donnell and others [R. O'Donnell et al., 2011; R. O'Donnell, 2014] which asks if ℍ_{∞}(f̂²) ≤ C⋅ Inf(f), where ℍ_{∞}(f̂²) is the min-entropy of the Fourier distribution. We show ℍ_{∞}(f̂²) ≤ 2⋅?_{min}^⊕(f), where ?_{min}^⊕(f) is the minimum parity certificate complexity of f. We also show that for all ε ≥ 0, we have ℍ_{∞}(f̂²) ≤ 2log (‖f̂‖_{1,ε}/(1-ε)), where ‖f̂‖_{1,ε} is the approximate spectral norm of f. As a corollary, we verify the FMEI conjecture for the class of read-k DNFs (for constant k). iv) Our third contribution is to better understand implications of the FEI conjecture for the structure of polynomials that 1/3-approximate a Boolean function on the Boolean cube. We pose a conjecture: no flat polynomial (whose non-zero Fourier coefficients have the same magnitude) of degree d and sparsity 2^ω(d) can 1/3-approximate a Boolean function. This conjecture is known to be true assuming FEI and we prove the conjecture unconditionally (i.e., without assuming the FEI conjecture) for a class of polynomials. We discuss an intriguing connection between our conjecture and the constant for the Bohnenblust-Hille inequality, which has been extensively studied in functional analysis. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Srinivasan Arunachalam and Sourav Chakraborty and Michal Koucký and Nitin Saurabh and Ronald de Wolf 2020 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 154, 37th International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2020) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2020.45 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-119062 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2020.45 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode