Local and Global Risk Bounds for Quantum Entropy Estimation under Projective-Design Measurements

Abstract

We establish a lower bound for estimating the von Neumann entropy from independent outcomes of any fixed rank-one POVM. A rotation-averaged van Trees argument gives a global minimax risk of at least $(d/n)\log^2\{n/(4d)\}$ when $d\ge C$ and $n\ge Cd$, without a projective-design assumption. We also characterize risk on an operator-norm ball of radius $r$ around the maximally mixed state. We allow an approximate second moment: on the trace-zero Hermitian subspace, the measurement frame may differ by $\varepsilon<1$ from the tight projective frame. A clipped estimator based on canonical dual shadows and the complete U-statistic for purity has risk at most $d^3r^2/n+d^4/n^2+d^6r^6$. Lower bounds under the same frame control yield the local minimax rate $d^3r^2/n+d^4/n^2$ when $n\ge Cd^2$ and $r$ lies in an explicit matching range. For every fixed upper bound on $\varepsilon$, approximation changes only the constants, not the powers of $d,n,r$. At the critical radius $r=n^{-1/2}$, the local risk is asymptotically negligible relative to the global risk when $n\log^2(n/d)\gg d^3$. This separation holds for projective 2-designs, including global Clifford measurements in qubit dimensions, and for their uniformly well-conditioned frame approximations. Finite-sample experiments in dimension four illustrate the critical-radius benchmark and the effect of a nonexact frame.