This book considers a relatively new metric in complex systems, transfer entropy, derived from a series of measurements, usually a time series. After a qualitative introduction and a chapter that explains the key ideas from statistics required to understand the text, the authors then present information theory and transfer entropy in depth. A key feature of the approach is the authors' work to show the relationship between information flow and complexity. The later chapters demonstrate information transfer in canonical systems, and applications, for example in neuroscience and in finance. The book will be of value to advanced undergraduate and graduate students and researchers in the areas of computer science, neuroscience, physics, and engineering.

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Transfer Entropy" that was published in Entropy

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Artificial Life, ECAL 2007, held in Lisbon, Portugal. The 125 revised full papers cover morphogenesis and development, robotics and autonomous agents, evolutionary computation and theory, cellular automata, models of biological systems and their applications, ant colony and swarm systems, evolution of communication, simulation of social interactions, self-replication, artificial chemistry.

One of the main issues in communications theory is measuring the ultimate data compression possible using the concept of entropy. While differential entropy may seem to be a simple extension of the discrete case, it is a more complex measure that often requires a more careful treatment. Handbook of Differential Entropy provides a comprehensive introduction to the subject for researchers and students in information theory. Unlike related books, this one brings together background material, derivations, and applications of differential entropy. The handbook first reviews probability theory as it enables an understanding of the core building block of entropy. The authors then carefully explain the concept of entropy, introducing both discrete and differential entropy. They present detailed derivations of differential entropy for numerous probability models and discuss challenges with interpreting and deriving differential entropy. They also show how differential entropy varies as a function of the model variance. Focusing on the application of differential entropy in several areas, the book describes common estimators of parametric and nonparametric differential entropy as well as properties of the estimators. It then uses the estimated differential entropy to estimate radar pulse delays when the corrupting noise source is non-Gaussian and to develop measures of coupling between dynamical system components.

Entropies and entropy-like quantities play an increasing role in modern non-linear data analysis. Fields that benefit from this application range from biosignal analysis to econophysics and engineering. This issue is a collection of papers touching on different aspects of entropy measures in data analysis, as well as theoretical and computational analyses. The relevant topics include the difficulty to achieve adequate application of entropy measures and the acceptable parameter choices for those entropy measures, entropy-based coupling, and similarity analysis, along with the utilization of entropy measures as features in automatic learning and classification. Various real data applications are given.

Proceedings of a NATO ASI held in Irsee/Kaufbeuren, Germany, June 15--26, 1990