Algebraic groups in non-commutative probability theory revisited

The role of coalgebras as well as algebraic groups in non-commutative probability has long been advocated by the school of von Waldenfels and Schürmann. Another algebraic approach was introduced more recently, based on shuffle and pre-Lie calculus, and results in another construction of groups of characters encoding the behavior of states. Comparing the two, the first approach, recast recently in a general categorical language by Manzel and Schürmann, can be seen as largely driven by the theory of universal products, whereas the second construction builds on Hopf algebras and a suitable algebraization of the combinatorics of non-crossing set partitions. Although both address the same phenomena, moving between the two viewpoints is not obvious. We present here an attempt to unify the two approaches by making explicit the Hopf algebraic connections between them. Our presentation, although relying largely on classical ideas as well as results closely related to Manzel and Schürmann’s aforementioned work, is nevertheless original on several points and fills a gap in the non-commutative probability literature. In particular, we systematically use the language and techniques of algebraic groups together with shuffle group techniques to prove that two notions of algebraic groups naturally associated with free, respectively, Boolean and monotone, probability theories identify. We also obtain explicit formulas for various Hopf algebraic structures and detail arguments that had been left implicit in the literature.