arXiv:2604.03634v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: We establish that temporal averaging over multiple observations is the degenerate case of algebraic group action with the trivial group $G={e}$. A General Replacement Theorem proves that a group-averaged estimator from one snapshot achieves equivalent subspace decomposition to multi-snapshot covariance estimation. The Trivial Group Embedding Theorem proves that the sample covariance is the accumulation of trivial-group estimates, with variance governed by a $(G,L)$ continuum as $1/(|G|cdot L)$. The processing gain $10log_{10}(M)$ dB equals the classical beamforming gain, establishing that this gain is a property of group order, not sensor count. The DFT, DCT, and KLT are unified as group-matched special cases. We conjecture a General Algebraic Averaging Theorem extending these results to arbitrary statistics, with variance governed by the effective group order $d_{mathrm{eff}}$. Monte Carlo experiments on the first four sample moments across five group types confirm the conjecture to four-digit precision. The framework exploits the $structure$ of information (representation-theoretic symmetry of the data object) rather than the content, complementing Shannon’s theory. Five applications are demonstrated: single-snapshot MUSIC, massive MIMO with 64% throughput gain, single-pulse waveform classification at 90% accuracy, graph signal processing with non-abelian groups, and algebraic analysis of transformer LLMs revealing RoPE uses the wrong group for 70–80% of attention heads (22,480 observations across five models).