Pinsker's inequality sets a lower bound on the Umegaki divergence of two quantum states in terms of their trace distance. In this work, we formulate corresponding estimates for a variety of quantum and classical divergences including
f-divergences like Hellinger and
χ2-divergences as well as Rényi divergences and special cases thereof like the Umegaki divergence, collision divergence, max divergence. We further provide a strategy on how to adapt these bounds to smoothed divergences.
The concept of classical
f-divergences gives a unified framework to construct and study measures of dissimilarity of probability distributions; special cases include the relative entropy and the R\'enyi divergences. Various quantum versions of this concept, and more narrowly, the concept of R\'enyi divergences, have been introduced in the literature with applications in quantum information theory; most notably Petz' quasi-entropies (standard
f-divergences), Matsumoto's maximal
f-divergences, measured
f-divergences, and sandwiched and
α-
z-R\'enyi divergences. In this paper we give a systematic overview of the various concepts of quantum
f-divergences with a main focus on their monotonicity under quantum operations, and the implications of the preservation of a quantum
f-divergence by a quantum operation. In particular, we compare the standard and the maximal
f-divergences regarding their ability to detect the reversibility of quantum operations. We also show that these two quantum
f-divergences are strictly different for non-commuting operators unless
f is a polynomial, and obtain some analogous partial results for the relation between the measured and the standard
f-divergences. We also study the monotonicity of the
α-
z-R\'enyi divergences under the special class of bistochastic maps that leave one of the arguments of the R\'enyi divergence invariant, and determine domains of the parameters
α,z where monotonicity holds, and where the preservation of the
α-
z-R\'enyi divergence implies the reversibility of the quantum operation.
We study sets of divergences or dissimilarity measures in a generalized real-algebraic setting which includes the cases of classical and quantum multivariate divergences. We show that a special subset of divergences, the so-called test spectrum, characterizes the rest of the divergences through barycentres and that the extreme points of relevant convex subsets of general divergences are contained within the test spectrum. Only some special parts of the test spectrum may contain non-extreme elements. We are able to fully characterize the test spectrum in the case of classical multivariate divergences. The quantum case is much more varied, and we demonstrate that essentially all the bivariate and multivariate quantum divergences suggested previously in literature are within the test spectrum and extreme within the set of all quantum (multivariate) divergences. This suggests that the variability of quantum divergences is real since all the previously suggested divergences are independent of each other.