A Characterization of Entropy as a Universal Monoidal Natural Transformation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autor principal: Li, Cheuk Ting
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2023
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author Li, Cheuk Ting
author_facet Li, Cheuk Ting
contents We show that the essential properties of entropy (monotonicity, additivity and subadditivity) are consequences of entropy being a monoidal natural transformation from the under category functor $-/\mathsf{LProb}_ρ$ (where $\mathsf{LProb}_ρ$ is category of $ρ$-th-power-summable probability distributions, $0<ρ<1$) to $Δ_{\mathbb{R}}$. Moreover, the Shannon entropy can be characterized as the universal monoidal natural transformation from $-/\mathsf{LProb}_ρ$ to the category of integrally closed partially ordered abelian groups (a reflective subcategory of the lax-slice 2-category over $\mathsf{MonCat}_{\ell}$ in the 2-category of monoidal categories), providing a succinct characterization of Shannon entropy as a reflection arrow. We can likewise define entropy for every monoidal category with a monoidal structure on its under categories (e.g. the category of finite abelian groups, the category of finite inhabited sets, the category of finite dimensional vector spaces, and the augmented simplex category) via the reflection arrow. This implies that all these entropies over different categories are components of a single natural transformation (the unit of the idempotent monad), allowing us to connect these entropies in a natural manner. We also provide a universal characterization of the conditional Shannon entropy based on the chain rule which, unlike the characterization of information loss by Baez, Fritz and Leinster, does not require any continuity assumption.
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publishDate 2023
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spellingShingle A Characterization of Entropy as a Universal Monoidal Natural Transformation
Li, Cheuk Ting
Category Theory
Information Theory
We show that the essential properties of entropy (monotonicity, additivity and subadditivity) are consequences of entropy being a monoidal natural transformation from the under category functor $-/\mathsf{LProb}_ρ$ (where $\mathsf{LProb}_ρ$ is category of $ρ$-th-power-summable probability distributions, $0<ρ<1$) to $Δ_{\mathbb{R}}$. Moreover, the Shannon entropy can be characterized as the universal monoidal natural transformation from $-/\mathsf{LProb}_ρ$ to the category of integrally closed partially ordered abelian groups (a reflective subcategory of the lax-slice 2-category over $\mathsf{MonCat}_{\ell}$ in the 2-category of monoidal categories), providing a succinct characterization of Shannon entropy as a reflection arrow. We can likewise define entropy for every monoidal category with a monoidal structure on its under categories (e.g. the category of finite abelian groups, the category of finite inhabited sets, the category of finite dimensional vector spaces, and the augmented simplex category) via the reflection arrow. This implies that all these entropies over different categories are components of a single natural transformation (the unit of the idempotent monad), allowing us to connect these entropies in a natural manner. We also provide a universal characterization of the conditional Shannon entropy based on the chain rule which, unlike the characterization of information loss by Baez, Fritz and Leinster, does not require any continuity assumption.
title A Characterization of Entropy as a Universal Monoidal Natural Transformation
topic Category Theory
Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.05742