The Universal Property of Measure-Theoretic Probability

Abstract

Building on work of Chen, we give a universal property of the Markov category BorelStoch of standard Borel spaces and Markov kernels between them. To do this, we introduce a new notion of *coinflip*, or unbiased binary choice, in a Markov category. These are unique if they exist, and automatically preserved by all Markov functors which preserve coproducts. We also provide universal characterizations of various Markov categories of discrete kernels.

v2: fixed a number of typos