Efficient Algorithms for Searching the Minimum Information Partition in Integrated Information Theory

The ability to integrate information in the brain is considered to be an essential property for cognition and consciousness. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) hypothesizes that the amount of integrated information ($Phi$) in the brain is related to the level of consciousness. IIT proposes that to quantify information integration in a system as a whole, integrated information should be measured across the partition of the system at which information loss caused by partitioning is minimized, called the Minimum Information Partition (MIP). The computational cost for exhaustively searching for the MIP grows exponentially with system size, making it difficult to apply IIT to real neural data. It has been previously shown that if a measure of $Phi$ satisfies a mathematical property, submodularity, the MIP can be found in a polynomial order by an optimization algorithm. However, although the first version of $Phi$ is submodular, the lat