PRE: 3 x Information transfer

Hi all,

A brief note revisiting the topic of information transfer in self-organised systems which seems to be a hot topic* at the moment: there are three papers in the February edition of Physical Review E investigating the transfer entropy measure, which you may be interested in:

2 papers use the transfer entropy, or variations on it, to infer causality**:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.77.026214 - “Inferring the directionality of coupling with conditional mutual information”, Martin Vejmelka and Milan Paluš.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.77.026216 - “Detecting direction of causal interactions between dynamically coupled signals”, Katsuhiko Ishiguro, Nobuyuki Otsu, Max Lungarella, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi.

And another (ours) introduces local transfer entropy to produce spatiotemporal information transfer profiles, in order to study the parameters of the transfer entropy and provide quantitative evidence that particles/gliders in cellular automata are indeed information transfer agents:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.77.026110 - “Local information transfer as a spatiotemporal filter for complex systems”, Joseph T. Lizier, Mikhail Prokopenko and Albert Y. Zomaya.

* I am somewhat biased in calling this a hot topic …

** Disclaimer: while I do believe in transfer entropy as a measure of information transfer, I don’t believe that (in unvaried form) it is a direct measure of causality (e.g. see “Information Flows in Causal Networks”, Nihat Ay and Daniel Polani, Advances in Complex Systems (to be published); also Santa Fe Institute Working Paper 06-05-014 http://www.santafe.edu/research/publications/workingpapers/06-05-014.pdf)