Related papers: Predictability, complexity and learning
We try to establish a unified information theoretic approach to learning and to explore some of its applications. First, we define {\em predictive information} as the mutual information between the past and the future of a time series,…
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…
We propose predictive information, that is information between a long past of duration T and the entire infinitely long future of a time series, as a universal order parameter to study phase transitions in physical systems. It can be used,…
Prediction of events is the challenge in many different disciplines, from meteorology to finance; the more this task is difficult, the more a system is {\it complex}. Nevertheless, even according to this restricted definition, a general…
Data Science and Machine learning have been growing strong for the past decade. We argue that to make the most of this exciting field we should resist the temptation of assuming that forecasting can be reduced to brute-force data analytics.…
Complex systems are found in most branches of science. It is still argued how to best quantify their complexity and to what end. One prominent measure of complexity (the statistical complexity) has an operational meaning in terms of the…
The problem of defining and studying complexity of a time series has interested people for years. In the context of dynamical systems, Grassberger has suggested that a slow approach of the entropy to its extensive asymptotic limit is a sign…
Predictive statistical mechanics is a form of inference from available data, without additional assumptions, for predicting reproducible phenomena. By applying it to systems with Hamiltonian dynamics, a problem of predicting the macroscopic…
Sequential data - ranging from financial time series to natural language - has driven the growing adoption of autoregressive models. However, these algorithms rely on the presence of underlying patterns in the data, and their identification…
Computers are deterministic dynamical systems (CHAOS 19:033124, 2009). Among other things, that implies that one should be able to use deterministic forecast rules to predict their behavior. That statement is sometimes-but not always-true.…
The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a…
Predictive inference requires balancing statistical accuracy against informational complexity, yet the choice of complexity measure is usually imposed rather than derived. We treat econometric objects as predictive rules, mappings from…
Information-theoretic (IT) measures are ubiquitous in artificial intelligence: entropy drives decision-tree splits and uncertainty quantification, cross-entropy is the default classification loss, mutual information underpins representation…
We show why the amount of information communicated between the past and future--the excess entropy--is not in general the amount of information stored in the present--the statistical complexity. This is a puzzle, and a long-standing one,…
Information theory is a powerful tool to express principles to drive autonomous systems because it is domain invariant and allows for an intuitive interpretation. This paper studies the use of the predictive information (PI), also called…
Forecasting is usually framed as a problem of model choice. This paper starts earlier, asking how much predictive information is available at each horizon. Under logarithmic loss, the answer is exact: the mutual information between the…
We introduce an ambidextrous view of stochastic dynamical systems, comparing their forward-time and reverse-time representations and then integrating them into a single time-symmetric representation. The perspective is useful theoretically,…
The study of complex systems has attracted widespread attention from researchers in the fields of natural sciences, social sciences, and engineering. Prediction is one of the central issues in this field. Although most related studies have…
We introduce an information-theoretic framework that views learning as universal prediction under log loss, characterized through regret bounds. Central to the framework is an effective notion of architecture-based model complexity, defined…
Information theory provides tools to predict the performance of a learning algorithm on a given dataset. For instance, the accuracy of learning an unknown parameter can be upper bounded by reducing the learning task to hypothesis testing…