The Rényi Entropies Operate in Positive Semifields

Abstract

We set out to demonstrate that the Rényi entropies are better thought of as operating in a type of non-linear semiring called a positive semifield. We show how the Rényi’s postulates lead to Pap’s g-calculus where the functions carrying out the domain transformation are Rényi’s information function and its inverse. In its turn, Pap’s g-calculus under Rényi’s information function transforms the set of positive reals into a family of semirings where “standard” product has been transformed into sum and “standard” sum into a power-emphasized sum. Consequently, the transformed product has an inverse whence the structure is actually that of a positive semifield. Instances of this construction lead to idempotent analysis and tropical algebra as well as to less exotic structures. We conjecture that this is one of the reasons why tropical algebra procedures, like the Viterbi algorithm of dynamic programming, morphological processing, or neural networks are so successful in computational intelligence applications. But also, why there seem to exist so many computational intelligence procedures to deal with “information” at large.