Let be the set of valid quintuples and choose uniformly from . Then
Apply Shearer's inequality to the ten pairs . Every index occurs in four pairs, so
Put . Since , it has cardinality . For each element of , its membership bits in are one of ; outside they are forced to be . Thus at most ordered pairs have any prescribed union. The chain rule for information entropy, conditional entropy, and the support bound for information entropy give
because every belongs to . There are ten pairs, hence
Exponentiating proves
which is the five-variable case of the entropy bound for pairwise-union tuples.
Independence makes
a Markov chain. The data processing inequality for mutual information therefore gives . Translation by the known value of is a bijection, so conditional entropy and independence give
and . Rearranging proves the stated entropy submodularity for three independent sums:
Monotonicity of the ordered probabilities gives , so . Consequently
Given , the source symbol can take at most values. The maximum entropy distribution on a finite set is uniform, hence
Averaging this conditional entropy inequality proves