  While most useful information theoretic inequalities can be deduced from the
basic properties of entropy or mutual information, up to now Shannon's entropy
power inequality (EPI) is an exception: Existing information theoretic proofs
of the EPI hinge on representations of differential entropy using either Fisher
information or minimum mean-square error (MMSE), which are derived from de
Bruijn's identity. In this paper, we first present an unified view of these
proofs, showing that they share two essential ingredients: 1) a data processing
argument applied to a covariance-preserving linear transformation; 2) an
integration over a path of a continuous Gaussian perturbation. Using these
ingredients, we develop a new and brief proof of the EPI through a mutual
information inequality, which replaces Stam and Blachman's Fisher information
inequality (FII) and an inequality for MMSE by Guo, Shamai and Verd\'u used in
earlier proofs. The result has the advantage of being very simple in that it
relies only on the basic properties of mutual information. These ideas are then
generalized to various extended versions of the EPI: Zamir and Feder's
generalized EPI for linear transformations of the random variables, Takano and
Johnson's EPI for dependent variables, Liu and Viswanath's
covariance-constrained EPI, and Costa's concavity inequality for the entropy
power.
