Related papers: Applying Information Theory to Software Evolution
We propose a formal expansion of the transfer entropy to put in evidence irreducible sets of variables which provide information for the future state of each assigned target. Multiplets characterized by a large contribution to the expansion…
Statistical modeling of physical laws connects experiments with mathematical descriptions of natural phenomena. The modeling is based on the probability density of measured variables expressed by experimental data via a kernel estimator. As…
The field of complex networks studies a wide variety of interacting systems by representing them as networks. To understand their properties and mutual relations, the randomisation of network connections is a commonly used tool. However,…
Accurately determining dependency structure is critical to discovering a system's causal organization. We recently showed that the transfer entropy fails in a key aspect of this---measuring information flow---due to its conflation of dyadic…
With the advent of open source software, a veritable treasure trove of previously proprietary software development data was made available. This opened the field of empirical software engineering research to anyone in academia. Data that is…
Humans communicate using systems of interconnected stimuli or concepts -- from language and music to literature and science -- yet it remains unclear how, if at all, the structure of these networks supports the communication of information.…
The characterisation of information processing is an important task in complex systems science. Information dynamics is a quantitative methodology for modelling the intrinsic information processing conducted by a process represented as a…
One approach to confronting computational hardness is to try to understand the contribution of various parameters to the running time of algorithms and the complexity of computational tasks. Almost no computational tasks in real life are…
As individuals communicate, their exchanges form a dynamic network. We demonstrate, using time series analysis of communication in three online settings, that network structure alone can be highly revealing of the diversity and novelty of…
Open source software is a rapidly evolving center for distributed work, and understanding the characteristics of this work across its different contexts is vital for informing policy, economics, and the design of enabling software. The…
Here we deconstruct, and then in a reasoned way reconstruct, the concept of "entropy of a system," paying particular attention to where the randomness may be coming from. We start with the core concept of entropy as a COUNT associated with…
Software engineering research has experienced rapid growth in both output and participation over the past decades. Yet concerns persist about the field's ability to accumulate, integrate, and reuse knowledge in ways that support long-term…
The recent progress of artificial intelligence(AI) has shown great potentials for alleviating human burden in various complex tasks. From the view of software engineering, AI techniques can be seen in many fundamental aspects of…
Software libraries are the elementary building blocks of open source software ecosystems, extending the capabilities of programming languages beyond their standard libraries. Although ecosystem health is often quantified using data on…
Software evolution is a fundamental process that transcends the realm of technical artifacts and permeates the entire organizational structure of a software project. By means of a longitudinal empirical study of 18 large open-source…
An information theoretic measure is derived that quantifies the statistical coherence between systems evolving in time. The standard time delayed mutual information fails to distinguish information that is actually exchanged from shared…
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…
Despite the wide usage of information as a concept in science, we have yet to develop a clear & concise scientific definition. This paper is aimed at laying the foundations for a new theory concerning the mechanics of information alongside…
This paper introduces \texttt{infotheory}: a package written in C++ and usable from Python and C++, for multivariate information theoretic analyses of discrete and continuous data. This package allows the user to study the relationship…
Finding interdependency relations between (possibly multivariate) time series provides valuable knowledge about the processes that generate the signals. Information theory sets a natural framework for non-parametric measures of several…