Information decomposition in complex systems via machine learning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Murphy, Kieran A., Bassett, Dani S.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917617714855936
author Murphy, Kieran A.
Bassett, Dani S.
author_facet Murphy, Kieran A.
Bassett, Dani S.
contents One of the fundamental steps toward understanding a complex system is identifying variation at the scale of the system's components that is most relevant to behavior on a macroscopic scale. Mutual information provides a natural means of linking variation across scales of a system due to its independence of functional relationship between observables. However, characterizing the manner in which information is distributed across a set of observables is computationally challenging and generally infeasible beyond a handful of measurements. Here we propose a practical and general methodology that uses machine learning to decompose the information contained in a set of measurements by jointly optimizing a lossy compression of each measurement. Guided by the distributed information bottleneck as a learning objective, the information decomposition identifies the variation in the measurements of the system state most relevant to specified macroscale behavior. We focus our analysis on two paradigmatic complex systems: a Boolean circuit and an amorphous material undergoing plastic deformation. In both examples, the large amount of entropy of the system state is decomposed, bit by bit, in terms of what is most related to macroscale behavior. The identification of meaningful variation in data, with the full generality brought by information theory, is made practical for studying the connection between micro- and macroscale structure in complex systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_04755
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Information decomposition in complex systems via machine learning
Murphy, Kieran A.
Bassett, Dani S.
Machine Learning
Soft Condensed Matter
Information Theory
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
One of the fundamental steps toward understanding a complex system is identifying variation at the scale of the system's components that is most relevant to behavior on a macroscopic scale. Mutual information provides a natural means of linking variation across scales of a system due to its independence of functional relationship between observables. However, characterizing the manner in which information is distributed across a set of observables is computationally challenging and generally infeasible beyond a handful of measurements. Here we propose a practical and general methodology that uses machine learning to decompose the information contained in a set of measurements by jointly optimizing a lossy compression of each measurement. Guided by the distributed information bottleneck as a learning objective, the information decomposition identifies the variation in the measurements of the system state most relevant to specified macroscale behavior. We focus our analysis on two paradigmatic complex systems: a Boolean circuit and an amorphous material undergoing plastic deformation. In both examples, the large amount of entropy of the system state is decomposed, bit by bit, in terms of what is most related to macroscale behavior. The identification of meaningful variation in data, with the full generality brought by information theory, is made practical for studying the connection between micro- and macroscale structure in complex systems.
title Information decomposition in complex systems via machine learning
topic Machine Learning
Soft Condensed Matter
Information Theory
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.04755