Related papers: The Information Theory of Individuality
Computational intelligence is broadly defined as biologically-inspired computing. Usually, inspiration is drawn from neural systems. This article shows how to analyze neural systems using information theory to obtain constraints that help…
I propose here a new concept of information based on two relevant aspects of its expression. The first related to the undeniable fact that the expression of information modifies the physical state of its receiver. The second to the…
This paper explores the idea that information is an essential and distinctive feature of living systems. Unlike non-living systems, living systems actively acquire, process, and use information about their environments to respond to…
The discipline of `theoretical biology' has been developing from its inception several decades ago almost in parallel with the advances in biology, so much so that the latter is often considered to be almost exclusively an empirical…
The concept of autonomy is fundamental for understanding biological organization and the evolutionary transitions of living systems. Understanding how a system constitutes itself as an individual, cohesive, self-organized entity is a…
Life depends as much on the flow of information as on the flow of energy. Here we review the many efforts to make this intuition precise. Starting with the building blocks of information theory, we explore examples where it has been…
In computer science, we can theoretically neatly separate transmission and processing of information, hardware and software, and programs and their inputs. This is much more intricate in biology, Nevertheless, I argue that Shannon's concept…
What is information, physically, and why does it so reliably emerge in living, cultural, and technological systems? Existing theories quantify uncertainty, cost, or compressibility, but do not identify which physical structures count as…
Understanding a complex system entails capturing the non-trivial collective phenomena that arise from interactions between its different parts. Information theory is a flexible and robust framework to study such behaviours, with several…
It is high time to openly and without finalism define the dangerous but needed term 'purposeful information', whose quantity is an Eigen information value. Using the term 'biological information' in its stead forces one into an…
Information is a key concept in evolutionary biology. Information is stored in biological organism's genomes, and used to generate the organism as well as to maintain and control it. Information is also "that which evolves". When a…
In an age of increasingly large data sets, investigators in many different disciplines have turned to clustering as a tool for data analysis and exploration. Existing clustering methods, however, typically depend on several nontrivial…
We identify fundamental issues with discretization when estimating information-theoretic quantities in the analysis of data. These difficulties are theoretical in nature and arise with discrete datasets carrying significant implications for…
Biological information processing manifests a huge variety in its complexity and capability among different organisms, which presumably stems from the evolutionary optimization under limited computational resources. Starting from the…
Despite the obvious advantage of simple life forms capable of fast replication, different levels of cognitive complexity have been achieved by living systems in terms of their potential to cope with environmental uncertainty. Against the…
Many biological phenomena or social events critically depend on how information evolves in complex networks. However, a general theory to characterize information evolution is yet absent. Consequently, numerous unknowns remain about the…
Information theory gives rise to a novel method for causal skeleton discovery by expressing associations between variables as tensors. This tensor-based approach reduces the dimensionality of the data needed to test for conditional…
Observations on the past provide some hints about what will happen in the future, and this can be quantified using information theory. The ``predictive information'' defined in this way has connections to measures of complexity that have…
Complex systems, from the human brain to the global economy, are made of multiple elements that interact in such ways that the behaviour of the `whole' often seems to be more than what is readily explainable in terms of the `sum of the…
Biological organisms adapt to changes by processing informations from different sources, most notably from their ancestors and from their environment. We review an approach to quantify these informations by analyzing mathematical models of…