📝 SummarXiv

Abstract

Normalization of probability distributions is not a distributive law. We introduce distributive sesquilaws to abstract normalization and, from their axioms, we derive some of its properties. In particular, normalized channels form a unital magmoid with an action of the category of subdistributions; its possibilistic analogue is the action from may-must relations into the category of relations. We argue that the magmoid of normalized channels is the stochastic analog of the category of relations.