A Class of Nonbinary Symmetric Information Bottleneck Problems

Abstract

We study two dual settings of information processing. Let $ \mathsf{Y} \rightarrow \mathsf{X} \rightarrow \mathsf{W} $ be a Markov chain with fixed joint probability mass function $ \mathsf{P}_{\mathsf{X}\mathsf{Y}} $ and a mutual information constraint on the pair $ (\mathsf{W},\mathsf{X}) $. For the first problem, known as Information Bottleneck, we aim to maximize the mutual information between the random variables $ \mathsf{Y} $ and $ \mathsf{W} $, while for the second problem, termed as Privacy Funnel, our goal is to minimize it. In particular, we analyze the scenario for which $ \mathsf{X} $ is the input, and $ \mathsf{Y} $ is the output of modulo-additive noise channel. We provide analytical characterization of the optimal information rates and the achieving distributions.