Berlin 2014 – scientific programme

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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 50: Quantum information: Concepts and methods III

Q 50.6: Talk

Thursday, March 20, 2014, 17:45–18:00, Kinosaal

Entropic inequalities in non-locality and causal discovery — Rafael Chaves, •Lukas Luft, and David Gross — University of Freiburg, Germany

The fields of quantum non-locality in physics, and causal discovery in machine learning, both face the problem of deciding whether observed data is compatible with a presumed causal relationship between the variables (for example a local hidden variable model).

Traditionally, in the field of non-locality, Bell inequalities have been used to describe the restrictions imposed by causal structures on marginal distributions. However, some such structures give rise to non-convex constraints on the accessible data, and it has recently been noted that linear inequalities on the observable entropies capture these situations more naturally. In this way, one can go beyond the usual Bell setup, exhibiting inequalities for scenarios with extra conditional independence assumptions, as well as a limited amount of shared randomness between the parties.

The entropic approach can also be applied to classical causal inference. The original discovery algorithms only consider the absence or presence of correlations in empirical data, but not their strength. We present instances of classical causal models that can be distinguished entropically, but not based on observed independences.