In this MSc thesis I consider the asymptotic behaviour of the symmetric error in composite hypothesis testing. In the classical case, when the null and alternative hypothesis are finite sets of states, the best achievable symmetric error exponent is simply the the best achievable symmetric error exponent corresponding to the "worst case pair". The conjecture -- raised several years ago -- is that this remains true in the quantum case, too. This is known to be true in some special case. However, all of the known special cases are in some sense "too nice", e.g., have certain symmetries. Hoping to find a counter-example, in my thesis I consider a new special case, which on one hand is as "asymmetrical" as possible, yet still analytically computable. However, as it turns out from some involved computation, the conjecture is also true in this case, and thus gives further evidence to this conjecture.
The trade-off between the two types of error probabilities in binary state discrimination may be quantified in the asymptotics by various error exponents. In the composite case, where the hypotheses consist of sets of states, any such exponent is upper bounded by the infimum of the corresponding pairwise exponents of discriminating individual members of the two sets. Attainability of this upper bound may depend on the type of exponents considered; whether the problem is classical or quantum; the cardinality and the geometric properties of the sets representing the hypotheses; and also on the dimensionality of the underlying Hilbert space. Our main contribution is clarifying this landscape considerably. We show that in the quantum case unattainability is the general behaviour for all the exponents, already in finite dimension, for a simple null-hypothesis and an alternative hypothesis consisting of only two states. Moreover, the upper bound may be strict even in the infinite-dimensional classical case if the alternative hypothesis contains at least countably infinitely many states. We also prove general attainability results, e.g., for classical adversarial and arbitrarily varying hypothesis testing, and for the quantum case where all states are pure, or the states commute with every state in the opposite hypothesis.
We consider symmetric hypothesis testing in quantum statistics, where the hypotheses are density operators on a finite-dimensional complex Hilbert space, representing states of a finite quantum system. We prove a lower bound on the asymptotic rate exponents of Bayesian error probabilities. The bound represents a quantum extension of the Chernoff bound, which gives the best asymptotically achievable error exponent in classical discrimination between two probability measures on a finite set. In our framework, the classical result is reproduced if the two hypothetic density operators commute. Recently, it has been shown elsewhere [Phys. Rev. Lett. 98 (2007) 160504] that the lower bound is achievable also in the generic quantum (noncommutative) case. This implies that our result is one part of the definitive quantum Chernoff bound.
We consider symmetric hypothesis testing in quantum statistics, where the hypotheses are density operators on a finite-dimensional complex Hilbert space, representing states of a finite quantum system. We prove a lower bound on the asymptotic rate exponents of Bayesian error probabilities. The bound represents a quantum extension of the Chernoff bound, which gives the best asymptotically achievable error exponent in classical discrimination between two probability measures on a finite set. In our framework, the classical result is reproduced if the two hypothetic density operators commute. Recently, it has been shown elsewhere [Phys. Rev. Lett. 98 (2007) 160504] that the lower bound is achievable also in the generic quantum (noncommutative) case. This implies that our result is one part of the definitive quantum Chernoff bound. 1
The generalized quantum Stein's lemma characterizes the optimal asymptotic exponent of the type-II error in quantum hypothesis testing for an independent and identically distributed (IID) null hypothesis against a composite alternative hypothesis. Classically, a probabilistic mixture of IID sources arises as a natural generalization of IID sources, and, in the non-composite setting, the optimal type-II error exponent in hypothesis testing for such classical mixed sources is known to be characterized concisely by the worst-case component of the mixture. In this work, we extend these foundational results to composite quantum hypothesis testing where the null hypothesis is a mixed source, i.e., a probabilistic mixture of IID quantum states, and the alternative hypothesis is composite as in the generalized quantum Stein's lemma. When the type-I error vanishes asymptotically, we characterize the optimal type-II error exponent of this composite quantum hypothesis testing problem in terms of the worst-case component of the mixture, by developing techniques for the non-commutative quantum setting inspired by the classical information-spectrum analysis. We also show that the analogous characterization does not hold in general for a fixed nonzero type-I error threshold, by providing a counterexample beyond the vanishing type-I error regime. These results clarify the applicability of the generalized quantum Stein's lemma to highly non-IID null hypotheses arising from arbitrary finite probabilistic mixtures of IID quantum states.
Given two families of quantum states
A and
B, called the null and the alternative hypotheses, quantum hypothesis testing is the task of determining whether an unknown quantum state belongs to
A or
B. Mistaking
A for
B is a type I error, and vice versa for the type II error. In quantum Shannon theory, a fundamental role is played by the Stein exponent, i.e. the asymptotic rate of decay of the type II error probability for a given threshold on the type I error probability. Stein exponents have been thoroughly investigated -- and, sometimes, calculated. However, most currently available solutions apply to settings where the hypotheses simple (i.e. composed of a single state), or else the families
A and
B need to satisfy stringent constraints that exclude physically important sets of states, such as separable states or stabiliser states. In this work, we establish a general formula for the Stein exponent where both hypotheses are allowed to be composite: the alternative hypothesis
B is assumed to be either composite i.i.d. or arbitrarily varying, with components taken from a known base set, while the null hypothesis
A is fully general, and required to satisfy only weak compatibility assumptions that are met in most physically relevant cases -- for instance, by the sets of separable or stabiliser states. Our result extends and subsumes the findings of [BBH, CMP 385:55, 2021] (that we also simplify), as well as the 'generalised quantum Sanov theorem' of [LBR, arXiv:2408.07067]. The proof relies on a careful quantum-to-classical reduction via measurements, followed by an application of the results on classical Stein exponents obtained in [Lami, arXiv:today]. We also devise new purely quantum techniques to analyse the resulting asymptotic expressions.
We consider the problem of detecting the true quantum state among r possible ones, based of measurements performed on n copies of a finite-dimensional quantum system. A special case is the problem of discriminating between r probability measures on a finite sample space, using n i.i.d. observations. In this classical setting, it is known that the averaged error probability decreases exponentially with exponent given by the worst case binary Chernoff bound between any possible pair of the r probability measures. Define analogously the multiple quantum Chernoff bound, considering all possible pairs of states. Recently, it has been shown that this asymptotic error bound is attainable in the case of r pure states, and that it is unimprovable in general. Here we extend the attainability result to a larger class of r-tuples of states which are possibly mixed, but pairwise linearly independent. We also construct a quantum detector which universally attains the multiple quantum Chernoff bound up to a factor 1/3.