English

infomeasure: A Comprehensive Python Package for Information Theory Measures and Estimators

Physics and Society 2025-08-18 v2 Information Theory math.IT Computational Physics Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability

Abstract

Information theory, i.e. the mathematical analysis of information and of its processing, has become a tenet of modern science; yet, its use in real-world studies is usually hindered by its computational complexity, the lack of coherent software frameworks, and, as a consequence, low reproducibility. We here introduce infomeasure, an open-source Python package designed to provide robust tools for calculating a wide variety of information-theoretic measures, including entropies, mutual information, transfer entropy and divergences. It is designed for both discrete and continuous variables; implements state-of-the-art estimation techniques; and allows the calculation of local measure values, pp-values and tt-scores. By unifying these approaches under one consistent framework, infomeasure aims to mitigate common pitfalls, ensure reproducibility, and simplify the practical implementation of information-theoretic analyses. In this contribution, we explore the motivation and features of infomeasure; its validation, using known analytical solutions; and exemplify its utility in a case study involving the analysis of human brain time series.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.14696,
  title  = {infomeasure: A Comprehensive Python Package for Information Theory Measures and Estimators},
  author = {Carlson Moses Büth and Kishor Acharya and Massimiliano Zanin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.14696},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

10 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables, for documentation, see https://infomeasure.readthedocs.io/

R2 v1 2026-07-01T02:26:05.364Z