Improved estimators of causal emergence for large systems

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Sas, Madalina I., Rosas, Fernando E., Rajpal, Hardik, Bor, Daniel, Jensen, Henrik J., Mediano, Pedro A. M.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866915703208017920
author Sas, Madalina I.
Rosas, Fernando E.
Rajpal, Hardik
Bor, Daniel
Jensen, Henrik J.
Mediano, Pedro A. M.
author_facet Sas, Madalina I.
Rosas, Fernando E.
Rajpal, Hardik
Bor, Daniel
Jensen, Henrik J.
Mediano, Pedro A. M.
contents A central challenge in the study of complex systems is the quantification of emergence -- understood as the ability of the system to exhibit collective behaviours that cannot be traced down to the individual components. While recent work has proposed practical measures to detect emergence, these approaches tend to double-count the contribution of shared components, which substantially hinders their capability to effectively study large systems. In this work, we introduce a family of improved information-theoretic measures of emergence that iteratively correct for double-counted terms. Our approach is computationally efficient and provides a controllable trade-off between computational load and sensitivity, leading to more accurate and versatile estimates of emergence. The benefits of the proposed approach are demonstrated by successfully detecting emergence in both simulated and real-world data related to flocking behaviour.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_00013
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improved estimators of causal emergence for large systems
Sas, Madalina I.
Rosas, Fernando E.
Rajpal, Hardik
Bor, Daniel
Jensen, Henrik J.
Mediano, Pedro A. M.
Physics and Society
Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems
A central challenge in the study of complex systems is the quantification of emergence -- understood as the ability of the system to exhibit collective behaviours that cannot be traced down to the individual components. While recent work has proposed practical measures to detect emergence, these approaches tend to double-count the contribution of shared components, which substantially hinders their capability to effectively study large systems. In this work, we introduce a family of improved information-theoretic measures of emergence that iteratively correct for double-counted terms. Our approach is computationally efficient and provides a controllable trade-off between computational load and sensitivity, leading to more accurate and versatile estimates of emergence. The benefits of the proposed approach are demonstrated by successfully detecting emergence in both simulated and real-world data related to flocking behaviour.
title Improved estimators of causal emergence for large systems
topic Physics and Society
Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00013