Degrees, Levels, and Profiles of Contextuality
Abstract
We introduce a new notion, that of a contextuality profile of a system of random variables. Rather than characterizing a system's contextuality by a single number, its overall degree of contextuality, we show how it can be characterized by a curve relating degree of contextuality to level at which the system is considered. A system is represented at level n if one only considers the joint distributions with no more than n variables, ignoring higher-order joint distributions. We show that the level-wise contextuality analysis can be used in conjunction with any well-constructed measure of contextuality. We present a method of concatenated systems to explore contextuality profiles systematically, and we apply it to the contextuality profiles for three major measures of contextuality proposed in the literature.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.26692,
title = {Degrees, Levels, and Profiles of Contextuality},
author = {Ehtibar N. Dzhafarov and Victor H. Cervantes},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.26692},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
32 pp. 15 figures, 10 tables (v.4 is close to the published version)