Information Dynamics of a Nonlinear Stochastic Nanopore System

Discrete Information Dynamics with Confidence via the Computational Mechanics Bootstrap: Confidence Sets and Significance Tests for Information-Dynamic Measures

Information dynamics and computational mechanics provide a suite of measures for assessing the information- and computation-theoretic properties of complex systems in the absence of mechanistic models. However, both approaches lack a core set of inferential tools needed to make them more broadly useful for analyzing real-world systems, namely reliable methods for constructing confidence sets and hypothesis tests for their underlying measures. We develop the computational mechanics bootstrap, a bootstrap method for constructing confidence sets and significance tests for information-dynamic measures via confidence distributions using estimates of ϵ -machines inferred via the Causal State Splitting Reconstruction (CSSR) algorithm. Via Monte Carlo simulation, we compare the inferential properties of the computational mechanics bootstrap to a Markov model bootstrap. The computational mechanics bootstrap is shown to have desirable inferential properties for a collection of model systems and generally outperforms the Markov model bootstrap. Finally, we perform an in silico experiment to assess the computational mechanics bootstrap's performance on a corpus of ϵ -machines derived from the activity patterns of fifteen-thousand Twitter users.

Information dynamics with confidence: Using reservoir computing to construct confidence intervals for information-dynamic measures

Information dynamics provides a broad set of measures for characterizing how a dynamical system stores, processes, and transmits information. While estimators for these measures are commonly used in applications, the statistical properties of these estimators for finite time series are not well understood. In particular, the precision of a given estimate is generally unknown. We develop confidence intervals for generic information-dynamic parameters using a bootstrap procedure. The bootstrap procedure uses an echo state network, a particular instance of a reservoir computer, as a simulator to generate bootstrap samples from a given time series. We perform a Monte Carlo analysis to investigate the performance of the bootstrap confidence intervals in terms of their coverage and expected lengths with two model systems and compare their performance to a simulator based on the random analog predictor. We find that our bootstrap procedure generates confidence intervals with nominal, or near nominal, coverage of the information-dynamic measures, with smaller expected length than the random analog predictor-based confidence intervals. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of the confidence intervals for characterizing the information dynamics of a time series of sunspot counts.