Lower and Upper Conditioning in Quantum Bayesian Theory

• Main Author: Bart Jacobs
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Publishing Association 2019-01-01
• Series: Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science
• Online Access: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.02438v2

Updating a probability distribution in the light of new evidence is a very basic operation in Bayesian probability theory. It is also known as state revision or simply as conditioning. This paper recalls how locally updating a joint state can equivalently be described via inference using the channel extracted from the state (via disintegration). This paper also investigates the quantum analogues of conditioning, and in particular the analogues of this equivalence between updating a joint state and inference. The main finding is that in order to obtain a similar equivalence, we have to distinguish two forms of quantum conditioning, which we call lower and upper conditioning. They are known from the literature, but the common framework in which we describe them and the equivalence result are new.