Estimation of quantum entropies

Abstract

Motivated by the importance of entropy functions in quantum data compression, entanglement theory, and various quantum information-processing tasks, this study demonstrates how classical algorithms for entropy estimation can effectively contribute to the construction of quantum algorithms for universal quantum entropy estimation. Given two quantum i.i.d. sources with completely unknown density matrices, algorithms are developed for estimating quantum cross entropy and quantum relative entropy. These estimation techniques represent a quantum generalization of the classical algorithms by Lempel, Ziv, and Merhav.