On the randomness of independent experiments

Abstract

Given a probability distribution P, what is the minimum amount of bits needed to store a value x sampled according to P, such that x can later be recovered (except with some small probability)? Or, what is the maximum amount of uniform randomness that can be extracted from x? Answering these and similar information-theoretic questions typically boils down to computing so-called smooth entropies. In this paper, we derive explicit and almost tight bounds on the smooth entropies of n-fold product distributions.