Generalized dual Sudakov minoration via dimension-reduction—a program

Abstract

We propose a program for establishing a conjectural extension to the class of (origin-symmetric) log-concave probability measures $\mu$, of the classical dual Sudakov Minoration on the expectation of the supremum of a Gaussian process: \begin{equation} \label{eq:abstract} M(Z_p(\mu), C \int ||x||_K d\mu \cdot K) \leq \exp(C p) \;\;\, \forall p \geq 1 . \end{equation} Here $K$ is an origin-symmetric convex body, $Z_p(\mu)$ is the $L_p$-centroid body associated to $\mu$, $M(A,B)$ is the packing-number of $B$ in $A$, and $C > 0$ is a universal constant. The Program consists of first establishing a Weak Generalized Dual Sudakov Minoration, involving the dimension $n$ of the ambient space, which is then self-improved to a dimension-free estimate after applying a dimension-reduction step. The latter step may be thought of as a conjectural small-ball one-sided variant of the Johnson--Lindenstrauss dimension-reduction lemma. We establish the Weak Generalized Dual Sudakov Minoration for a variety of log-concave probability measures and convex bodies (for instance, this step is fully resolved assuming a positive answer to the Slicing Problem). The Separation Dimension-Reduction step is fully established for ellipsoids and, up to logarithmic factors in the dimension, for cubes, resulting in a corresponding Generalized (regular) Dual Sudakov Minoration estimate for these bodies and arbitrary log-concave measures, which are shown to be (essentially) best-possible. Along the way, we establish a regular version of (\ref{eq:abstract}) for all $p \geq n$ and provide a new direct proof of Sudakov Minoration via The Program.