Displacement convexity of entropy and related inequalities on graphs

Abstract

We introduce the notion of an interpolating path on the set of probability measures on finite graphs. Using this notion, we first prove a displacement convexity property of entropy along such a path and derive Prékopa-Leindler type inequalities, a Talagrand transport-entropy inequality, certain HWI type as well as log-Sobolev type inequalities in discrete settings. To illustrate through examples, we apply our results to the complete graph and to the hypercube for which our results are optimal—by passing to the limit, we recover the classical log-Sobolev inequality for the standard Gaussian measure with the optimal constant.