The Poincaré inequality and quadratic transportation-variance inequalities

Abstract

It is known that the Poincare inequality is equivalent to the quadratic transportation-variance inequality (namely $W_{2}^{2}(f\mu ,\mu ) \leqslant C_{V} \mathrm{Var} _{\mu }(f)$), see Jourdain [10] and most recently Ledoux [12]. We give two alternative proofs to this fact. In particular, we achieve a smaller $C_{V}$ than before, which equals the double of Poincare constant. Applying the same argument leads to more characterizations of the Poincare inequality. Our method also yields a by-product as the equivalence between the logarithmic Sobolev inequality and strict contraction of heat flow in Wasserstein space provided that the Bakry-Emery curvature has a lower bound (here the control constants may depend on the curvature bound). Next, we present a comparison inequality between $W_{2}^{2}(f\mu ,\mu )$ and its centralization $W_{2}^{2}(f_{c}\mu ,\mu )$ for $f_{c} = \frac{|\sqrt {f} - \mu (\sqrt {f})|^{2}} {\mathrm{Var} _{\mu }(\sqrt{f} )}$, which may be viewed as some special counterpart of the Rothaus’ lemma for relative entropy. Then it yields some new bound of $W_{2}^{2}(f\mu ,\mu )$ associated to the variance of $\sqrt{f} $ rather than $f$. As a by-product, we have another proof to derive the quadratic transportation-information inequality from Lyapunov condition, avoiding the Bobkov-Gotze’s characterization of the Talagrand’s inequality.