No Arabic abstract
Transfer entropy (TE) was introduced by Schreiber in 2000 as a measurement of the predictive capacity of one stochastic process with respect to another. Originally stated for discrete time processes, we expand the theory in line with recent work of Spinney, Prokopenko, and Lizier to define TE for stochastic processes indexed over a compact interval taking values in a Polish state space. We provide a definition for continuous time TE using the Radon-Nikodym Theorem, random measures, and projective limits of probability spaces. As our main result, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions to obtain this definition as a limit of discrete time TE, as well as illustrate its application via an example involving Poisson point processes. As a derivative of continuous time TE, we also define the transfer entropy rate between two processes and show that (under mild assumptions) their stationarity implies a constant rate. We also investigate TE between homogeneous Markov jump processes and discuss some open problems and possible future directions.
We propose a new estimator to measure directed dependencies in time series. The dimensionality of data is first reduced using a new non-uniform embedding technique, where the variables are ranked according to a weighted sum of the amount of new information and improvement of the prediction accuracy provided by the variables. Then, using a greedy approach, the most informative subsets are selected in an iterative way. The algorithm terminates, when the highest ranked variable is not able to significantly improve the accuracy of the prediction as compared to that obtained using the existing selected subsets. In a simulation study, we compare our estimator to existing state-of-the-art methods at different data lengths and directed dependencies strengths. It is demonstrated that the proposed estimator has a significantly higher accuracy than that of existing methods, especially for the difficult case, where the data is highly correlated and coupled. Moreover, we show its false detection of directed dependencies due to instantaneous couplings effect is lower than that of existing measures. We also show applicability of the proposed estimator on real intracranial electroencephalography data.
We establish a discrete analog of the Renyi entropy comparison due to Bobkov and Madiman. For log-concave variables on the integers, the min entropy is within log e of the usual Shannon entropy. Additionally we investigate the entropic Rogers-Shephard inequality studied by Madiman and Kontoyannis, and establish a sharp Renyi version for certain parameters in both the continuous and discrete cases
The forward prediction problem for a binary time series ${X_n}_{n=0}^{infty}$ is to estimate the probability that $X_{n+1}=1$ based on the observations $X_i$, $0le ile n$ without prior knowledge of the distribution of the process ${X_n}$. It is known that this is not possible if one estimates at all values of $n$. We present a simple procedure which will attempt to make such a prediction infinitely often at carefully selected stopping times chosen by the algorithm. The growth rate of the stopping times is also exhibited.
A strengthened version of the central limit theorem for discrete random variables is established, relying only on information-theoretic tools and elementary arguments. It is shown that the relative entropy between the standardised sum of $n$ independent and identically distributed lattice random variables and an appropriately discretised Gaussian, vanishes as $ntoinfty$.
Quantifying the impact of parametric and model-form uncertainty on the predictions of stochastic models is a key challenge in many applications. Previous work has shown that the relative entropy rate is an effective tool for deriving path-space uncertainty quantification (UQ) bounds on ergodic averages. In this work we identify appropriate information-theoretic objects for a wider range of quantities of interest on path-space, such as hitting times and exponentially discounted observables, and develop the corresponding UQ bounds. In addition, our method yields tighter UQ bounds, even in cases where previous relative-entropy-based methods also apply, e.g., for ergodic averages. We illustrate these results with examples from option pricing, non-reversible diffusion processes, stochastic control, semi-Markov queueing models, and expectations and distributions of hitting times.