English

A new quantum version of f-divergence

Quantum Physics 2018-02-07 v4

Abstract

This paper proposes and studies new quantum version of ff-divergences, a class of convex functionals of a pair of probability distributions including Kullback-Leibler divergence, Rnyi-type relative entropy and so on. There are several quantum versions so far, including the one by Petz. We introduce another quantum version (Dfmax\mathrm{D}_{f}^{\max}, below), defined as the solution to an optimization problem, or the minimum classical ff- divergence necessary to generate a given pair of quantum states. It turns out to be the largest quantum ff-divergence. The closed formula of Dfmax\mathrm{D}_{f}^{\max} is given either if ff is operator convex, or if one of the state is a pure state. Also, concise representation of Dfmax\mathrm{D}_{f}^{\max} as a pointwise supremum of linear functionals is given and used for the clarification of various properties of the quality. Using the closed formula of Dfmax\mathrm{D}_{f}^{\max}, we show: Suppose ff is operator convex. Then the\ maximum ff\,- divergence of the probability distributions of a measurement under the state ρ\rho and σ\sigma is strictly less than Dfmax(ρσ)\mathrm{D}_{f}^{\max}\left( \rho\Vert\sigma\right) . This statement may seem intuitively trivial, but when ff is not operator convex, this is not always true. A counter example is f(λ)=1λf\left( \lambda\right) =\left\vert 1-\lambda\right\vert , which corresponds to total variation distance. We mostly work on finite dimensional Hilbert space, but some results are extended to infinite dimensional case.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1311.4722,
  title  = {A new quantum version of f-divergence},
  author = {Keiji Matsumoto},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1311.4722},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

The proof of dual representation of the former version was misstated. An alternative proof is presented

R2 v1 2026-06-22T02:10:24.562Z