Novel lower bounds on the entropy rate of binary hidden Markov processes

Recently, Samorodnitsky proved a strengthened version of Mrs. Gerber's Lemma, where the output entropy of a binary symmetric channel is bounded in terms of the average entropy of the input projected on a random subset of coordinates. Here, this result is applied for deriving novel lower bounds on the entropy rate of binary hidden Markov processes. For symmetric underlying Markov processes, our bound improves upon the best known bound in the very noisy regime. The nonsymmetric case is also considered, and explicit bounds are derived for Markov processes that satisfy the (1, ∞)-RLL constraint.