The four-atom conjecture on the minimum Ingleton score

About 15 years old · traced to

Given four random variables A,B,C,DA,B,C,D with a probability distribution, define the Ingleton score by

I(A;B∣C)+I(A;B∣D)+I(C;D)−I(A;B)H(ABCD).\frac{I(A;B|C)+I(A;B|D)+I(C;D)-I(A;B)}{H(ABCD)}.

Four-atom conjecture. The lowest possible Ingleton score is approximately −0.089373-0.089373. It is attained by a four-variable distribution with alphabet size two, given by

P(0,0,0,0)=P(1,1,1,1)=αP(0,0,0,0)=P(1,1,1,1)=\alpha P(0,1,0,1)=P(0,1,1,0)=0.5−α,P(0,1,0,1)=P(0,1,1,0)=0.5-\alpha,

where α\alpha takes on a value approximately equal to 0.3504570.350457.

This conjecture identifies a binary four-variable distribution that is claimed to minimize the Ingleton score, a normalized measure of violation of Ingleton's inequality. The parser provides no evidence resolving whether this minimum is indeed globally optimal.

References

Primary source

Randall Dougherty, Chris Freiling and Kenneth Zeger, “Non-Shannon Information Inequalities in Four Random Variables”, arXiv:1104.3602 (2011).

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