Mutual Information Bounded by Fisher Information

Wojciech Górecki, Xi Lu, Chiara Macchiavello, Lorenzo Maccone

Published 2024-03-15Version 1

We derive a general upper bound to mutual information in terms of the Fisher information. The bound may be further used to derive a lower bound for Bayesian quadratic cost. These two provide alternatives to the Efroimovich and to the van Trees inequality that are useful also for classes of prior distributions where the latter ones give trivial bounds. We illustrate the usefulness of our bounds with a case study in quantum phase estimation. Here, they allow us to adapt to mutual information the known and highly nontrivial bounds for Fisher information in the presence of noise. This nicely complements quantum metrology, since Fisher information is useful to gauge local estimation strategies, whereas mutual information is useful for global strategies.