The mathematical landscape of partial information decomposition: A comprehensive review of properties and measures

arXiv:2603.06678v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Partial Information Decomposition (PID) has become one of the most prominent information-theoretic frameworks for describing the structure and quality of information in complex systems. Despite its widespread utility, there exists no unique solution constraining precisely how a PID should be constructed, leading to a multiverse of different formalisms with different mathematical commitments. In this work, we provide a comprehensive overview of the mathematical landscape of PID. By integrating existing PID measures into a common language, we systematically examine all major approaches to the PID framework that have emerged so far, determining for each measure whether or not each known property holds. In addition, we derive a web of all known theorems mapping the relationships and incompatibilities between these properties, before also revealing some novel interdependency results. In doing so, we chart a brief history of the framework, promote a unified perspective for its discussions, and offer a path towards both theoretical refinement and informed empirical applications for the future of this powerful method.