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arXiv:quant-ph/0208020 · Journal of Physics A Mathematical and General

Optimal sequence of quantum measurements in the sense of Stein s lemma in quantum hypothesis testing

Masahito Hayashi

Published Dec 2, 2002• 124 citations
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Abstract

We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for a sequence of quantum measurements to achieve the optimal performance in quantum hypothesis testing. We discuss what quantum measurement we should perform in order to attain the optimal exponent of the second error probability under the condition that the first error probability goes to 0. As an asymptotically optimal measurement, we propose a projection measurement characterized by the irreducible representation theory of the special linear group SL ( ). Especially, in the spin-1/2 system, it is realized by the simultaneous measurement of the total momentum and a momentum of a specified direction. As a by-product, we obtain another proof of quantum Stein's lemma. In addition, an asymptotically optimal measurement is constructed in the quantum Gaussian case, and it is physically meaningful.

DOI
10.1088/0305-4470/35/50/307

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We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for a sequence of quantum measurements to achieve the optimal performance in quantum hypothesis testing. We discuss what quantum measurement we should perform in order to attain the optimal exponent of the second error probability under the condition that the first error probability goes to 0. As an asymptotically optimal measurement, we propose a projection measurement characterized by the irreducible representation theory of the special linear group SL ( ). Especially, in the spin-1/2 system, it is realized by the simultaneous measurement of the total momentum and a momentum of a specified direction. As a by-product, we obtain another proof of quantum Stein's lemma. In addition, an asymptotically optimal measurement is constructed in the quantum Gaussian case, and it is physically meaningful.
We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for a sequence of quantum measurements to achieve the optimal performance in quantum hypothesis testing. Using an information-spectrum method, we discuss what quantum measurement we should perform in order to attain the optimal exponent of the second error probability under the condition that the first error probability goes to 0. As an asymptotically optimal measurement, we propose a projection measurement characterized by the irreducible representation theory of the special linear group SL(H). Specially, in spin 1/2 system, it is realized by the simultaneous measurement of the total momentum and a momentum of a specified direction. As a byproduct, we obtain another proof of quantum Stein's lemma.
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.
In the asymptotic theory of quantum hypothesis testing, the minimal error probability of the first kind jumps sharply from zero to one when the error exponent of the second kind passes by the point of the relative entropy of the two states in an increasing way. This is well known as the direct part and strong converse of quantum Stein’s lemma. Here we look into the behavior of this sudden change and have make it clear how the error of first kind grows smoothly according to a lower order of the error exponent of the second kind, and hence we obtain the second-order asymptotics for quantum hypothesis testing. This actually implies quantum Stein’s lemma as a special case. Meanwhile, our analysis also yields tight bounds for the case of finite sample size. These results have potential applications in quantum information theory. Our method is elementary, based on basic linear algebra and probability theory. It deals with the achievability part and the optimality part in a unified fashion.
We consider sequential hypothesis testing among multiple samples of one amongMMMpure quantum states in an equidistant ensemble, i.e., those with identical pair-wise inner products. Each measurement in the sequence is a binary projective measurement that collapses the sample of the state measured at that instant into a linear span of a collection of states from the ensemble or its orthogonal complement. The algorithm adaptively decides if additional samples are needed or sufficient observation has been gathered. We show that our sequential measurement algorithm outperforms the sequential testing (ST) receiver, whose error-probability exponent is known to achieve the quantum Chernoff bound asymptotically in the limit of large (and fixed) number of samples. Even though our algorithm does not attain the quantum limit of minimum error probability (the Helstrom limit), it paves the way for future research on more advanced sequential quantum hypothesis tests, e.g., those that go beyond binary projective measurements on each sample.
The asymptotic discrimination problem of two quantum states is studied in the setting where measurements are required to be invariant under some symmetry group of the system. We consider various asymptotic error exponents in connection with the problems of the Chernoff bound, the Hoeffding bound, and Stein’s lemma, and derive bounds on these quantities in terms of their corresponding statistical distance measures. A special emphasis is put on the comparison of the performances of group-invariant and unrestricted measurements.