We define a natural operation of conditioning of tropical diagrams of probability spaces and show that it is Lipschitz continuous with respect to the asymptotic entropy distance.
After endowing the space of diagrams of probability spaces with an entropy distance, we study its large-scale geometry by identifying the asymptotic cone as a closed convex cone in a Banach space. We call this cone the tropical cone, and its elements
tropical diagrams of probability spaces. Given that the tropical cone has a rich structure, while tropical diagrams are rather flexible objects, we expect the theory of tropical diagrams to be useful for information optimization problems in information theory and artificial intelligence. In a companion article, we give a first application to derive a statement about the entropic cone.
Arrow contraction applied to a tropical diagram of probability spaces is a modification of the diagram, replacing one of the morphisms by an isomorphims, while preserving other parts of the diagram. It is related to the rate regions introduced by Ahl
swede and Korner. In a companion article we use arrow contraction to derive information about the shape of the entropic cone. Arrow expansion is the inverse operation to the arrow contraction.
We survey the published work of Harry Kesten in probability theory, with emphasis on his contributions to random walks, branching processes, percolation, and related topics. A complete bibliography is included of his publications.
These are lecture notes written at the University of Zurich during spring 2014 and spring 2015. The first part of the notes gives an introduction to probability theory. It explains the notion of random events and random variables, probability measure
s, expectation, distributions, characteristic function, independence of random variables, types of convergence and limit theorems. The first part is separated into two different chapters. The first chapter is about combinatorial aspects of probability theory and the second chapter is the actual introduction to probability theory, which contains the modern probability language. The second part covers conditional expectations, martingales and Markov chains, which are easily accessible after reading the first part. The chapters are exactly covered in this order and go into some more details of the respective topic.
In a series of articles, we have been developing a theory of tropical diagrams of probability spaces, expecting it to be useful for information optimization problems in information theory and artificial intelligence. In this article, we give a summar
y of our work so far and apply the theory to derive a dimension-reduction statement about the shape of the entropic cone.