Information and Complexity, Or: Where Is the Information?

Publikationstyp
Conference Paper
Date Issued
2018-07
Sprache
English
Author(s)
Ay, Nihat  
Bertschinger, Nils  
Jost, Jürgen  
Olbrich, Eckehard  
Rauh, Johannes  
TORE-URI
http://hdl.handle.net/11420/12737
Journal
Springer proceedings in mathematics & statistics  
Volume
383
Start Page
87
End Page
105
Citation
Summer School on Complexity and Emergence: Ideas, Methods, with a Special Attention to Economics and Finance (2018)
Contribution to Conference
Summer School on Complexity and Emergence: Ideas, Methods, with a Special Attention to Economics and Finance, 2018  
Publisher DOI
10.1007/978-3-030-95703-2_4
Scopus ID
2-s2.0-85130222119
We demonstrate how a systematic theory of complexity emerges from information theoretical concepts. The complexity of a structure may refer to the difficulty of its description, the encoding of its regularities or the relations between its elements, components or parts. All such measures can be and usually are quantified with the help of information theoretical concepts. We first describe those concepts and then use them to analyze how complexity emerges from interactions between parts or conversely, can be decomposed into individual, joint, or complementary contributions of those parts. We can also use these theoretical concepts to understand the interaction between a system and its environment and the relations between different levels of aggregation in complex systems.
Subjects
Complexity measures
Information decomposition
Information theory
Levels and scales
Mutual information