Change of Multivariate Mutual Information: From Local to Global

Chung Chan, Ali Al-Bashabsheh, Qiaoqiao Zhou

Abstract: We study the change of multivariate mutual information among a set of random variables when some common randomness is added to or removed from a subset of the random variables. This is formulated more precisely as two new multiterminal secret key agreement problems that, respectively, ask how one can increase the secrecy capacity efficiently by adding common randomness to a small subset of users, and how one can simplify the source model by removing redundant common randomness that does not contribute to the secrecy capacity. Characterizations and strongly polynomial-time computations are derived for the rates of change, maximum usable increment, and redundancy. These results can be applied to study the communication complexity for secret key agreement.