Structural Information in Two-Dimensional Patterns: Entropy Convergence and Excess Entropy

David P. Feldman
College of the Atlantic
105 Eden Street
Bar Harbor, ME 04609, USA
and
Santa Fe Institute
1399 Hyde Park Rd.
Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA
James P. Crutchfield
Santa Fe Institute
1399 Hyde Park Rd.
Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA

ABSTRACT: We develop information-theoretic measures of spatial structure and pattern in more than one dimension. As is well known, the entropy density of a two-dimensional configuration can be efficiently and accurately estimated via a converging sequence of conditional entropies. We show that the manner in which these conditional entropies converge to their asymptotic value serves as a measure of global correlation and structure for spatial systems in any dimension. We compare and contrast entropy-convergence with mutual-information and structure-factor techniques for quantifying and detecting spatial structure.

D. P. Feldman and J. P. Crutchfield, "Structural Information in Two-Dimensional Patterns: Entropy Convergence and Excess Entropy", Physical Review E 67 (2003) 051104.
[pdf]= 224kb [ps]= 3367kb [ps.gz]= 1301kb
Santa Fe Institute Working Paper 02-12-065. arXiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0212078.