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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bossi, Emanuele, Diggans, C. Tyler, AlMomani, Abd AlRahman R.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02397
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Table of Contents:
  • The Boltzmann-Shannon Index (BSI) for clustered continuous data is introduced as a normalized measure that captures the relationship between geometry-based and frequency-based probability distributions defined over the clusters. In essence, it quantifies the similarity across densities of the clusters, which are defined by a given labeling. This labeling may originate from a geometric partitioning of the state space itself, but need not in general. We illustrate its performance on synthetic Gaussian mixtures, the Iris benchmark data set, and a high-imbalance resource-allocation scenario, showing that the BSI provides a coherent assessment in cases where traditional metrics give incomplete or misleading signals. Moreover, in the resource-allocation setting where equal density may be associated with a "fair" distribution, we demonstrate that BSI not only detects inequality with high sensitivity, but also offers a numerically smooth measure that can be easily embedded in optimization frameworks as a regularization term for modern policy-making. Finally, the BSI also offers a new measure of the effectiveness for a given symbolic representation, i.e. coarse-grain states, for continuous-valued data recorded from complex dynamical systems.