Information flow within stochastic dynamical systems

Abstract

Information flow or information transfer is an important concept in dynamical systems which has applications in a wide variety of scientific disciplines. In this study, we show that a rigorous formalism can be established in the context of a generic stochastic dynamical system. The resulting measure of of information transfer possesses a property of transfer asymmetry and, when the stochastic perturbation to the receiving component does not rely on the giving component, has a form same as that for the corresponding deterministic system. An application with a two-dimensional system is presented, and the resulting transfers are just as expected. A remarkable observation is that, for two highly correlated time series, there could be no information transfer from one certain series, say $x_2$, to the other ($x_1$). That is to say, the evolution of $x_1$ may have nothing to do with $x_2$, even though $x_1$ and $x_2$ are highly correlated. Information transfer analysis thus extends the traditional notion of correlation analysis by providing a quantitative measure of causality between time series.