A Logarithmic Decomposition and a Signed Measure Space for Entropy

Abstract

The Shannon entropy of a random variable X has much behaviour analogous to a signed measure. Previous work has explored this connection by defining a signed measure on abstract sets, which are taken to represent the information that different random variables contain. This construction is sufficient to derive many measure-theoretical counterparts to information quantities such as the mutual information $I(X; Y) = \mu(\tilde{X} \cap \tilde{Y})$, the joint entropy $H(X,Y) = \mu(\tilde{X} \cup \tilde{Y})$, and the conditional entropy $H(X|Y) = \mu(\tilde{X} \setminus \tilde{Y})$. Here we provide concrete characterisations of these abstract sets and a corresponding signed measure, and in doing so we demonstrate that there exists a much finer decomposition with intuitive properties which we call the logarithmic decomposition (LD). We show that this signed measure space has the useful property that its logarithmic atoms are easily characterised with negative or positive entropy, while also being consistent with Yeung's I-measure. We present the usability of our approach by re-examining the G\'acs-K\"orner common information and the Wyner common information from this new geometric perspective and characterising it in terms of our logarithmic atoms - a property we call logarithmic decomposability. We present possible extensions of this construction to continuous probability distributions before discussing implications for quality-led information theory. Lastly, we apply our new decomposition to examine the Dyadic and Triadic systems of James and Crutchfield and show that, in contrast to the I-measure alone, our decomposition is able to qualitatively distinguish between them.