English

Information structures and their cohomology

Information Theory 2021-11-09 v4 Algebraic Topology math.IT Probability

Abstract

We introduce the category of information structures, whose objects are suitable diagrams of measurable sets that encode the possible outputs of a given family of observables and their mutual relationships of refinement; they serve as mathematical models of contextuality in classical and quantum settings. Each information structure can be regarded as a ringed site with trivial topology; the structure ring is generated by the observables themselves and its multiplication corresponds to joint measurement. We extend Baudot and Bennequin's definition of information cohomology to this setting, as a derived functor in the category of modules over the structure ring, and show explicitly that the bar construction gives a projective resolution in that category, recovering in this way the cochain complexes previously considered in the literature. Finally, we study the particular case of a one-parameter family of coefficients made of functions of probability distributions. The only 1-cocycles are Shannon entropy or Tsallis α\alpha-entropy, depending on the value of the parameter.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1709.07807,
  title  = {Information structures and their cohomology},
  author = {Juan Pablo Vigneaux},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.07807},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

54 pages, 1 figure. This improved version was finally published in Theory and Applications of Categories. It took into account multiple suggestion of the reviewer

R2 v1 2026-06-22T21:52:03.598Z