Transfer entropy for finite data

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Kirkley, Alec
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Kirkley, Alec
author_facet Kirkley, Alec
contents Transfer entropy is a widely used measure for quantifying directed information flows in complex systems. While the challenges of estimating transfer entropy for continuous data are well known, it has two major shortcomings for data of finite cardinality: it exhibits a substantial positive bias for sparse bin counts, and it has no clear means to assess statistical significance. By computing information content in finite data streams without explicitly considering symbols as instances of random variables, we derive a transfer entropy measure which is asymptotically equivalent to the standard plug-in estimator but remedies these issues for time series of small size and/or high cardinality, permitting a fully nonparametric assessment of statistical significance without simulation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_16215
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Transfer entropy for finite data
Kirkley, Alec
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Social and Information Networks
Transfer entropy is a widely used measure for quantifying directed information flows in complex systems. While the challenges of estimating transfer entropy for continuous data are well known, it has two major shortcomings for data of finite cardinality: it exhibits a substantial positive bias for sparse bin counts, and it has no clear means to assess statistical significance. By computing information content in finite data streams without explicitly considering symbols as instances of random variables, we derive a transfer entropy measure which is asymptotically equivalent to the standard plug-in estimator but remedies these issues for time series of small size and/or high cardinality, permitting a fully nonparametric assessment of statistical significance without simulation.
title Transfer entropy for finite data
topic Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16215