231 research outputs found
Entropy and Long range correlations in literary English
Recently long range correlations were detected in nucleotide sequences and in
human writings by several authors. We undertake here a systematic investigation
of two books, Moby Dick by H. Melville and Grimm's tales, with respect to the
existence of long range correlations. The analysis is based on the calculation
of entropy like quantities as the mutual information for pairs of letters and
the entropy, the mean uncertainty, per letter. We further estimate the number
of different subwords of a given length . Filtering out the contributions
due to the effects of the finite length of the texts, we find correlations
ranging to a few hundred letters. Scaling laws for the mutual information
(decay with a power law), for the entropy per letter (decay with the inverse
square root of ) and for the word numbers (stretched exponential growth with
and with a power law of the text length) were found.Comment: 8 page
Spreading and shortest paths in systems with sparse long-range connections
Spreading according to simple rules (e.g. of fire or diseases), and
shortest-path distances are studied on d-dimensional systems with a small
density p per site of long-range connections (``Small-World'' lattices). The
volume V(t) covered by the spreading quantity on an infinite system is exactly
calculated in all dimensions. We find that V(t) grows initially as t^d/d for
t>t^*$,
generalizing a previous result in one dimension. Using the properties of V(t),
the average shortest-path distance \ell(r) can be calculated as a function of
Euclidean distance r. It is found that
\ell(r) = r for r<r_c=(2p \Gamma_d (d-1)!)^{-1/d} log(2p \Gamma_d L^d), and
\ell(r) = r_c for r>r_c.
The characteristic length r_c, which governs the behavior of shortest-path
lengths, diverges with system size for all p>0. Therefore the mean separation s
\sim p^{-1/d} between shortcut-ends is not a relevant internal length-scale for
shortest-path lengths. We notice however that the globally averaged
shortest-path length, divided by L, is a function of L/s only.Comment: 4 pages, 1 eps fig. Uses psfi
Finite-sample frequency distributions originating from an equiprobability distribution
Given an equidistribution for probabilities p(i)=1/N, i=1..N. What is the
expected corresponding rank ordered frequency distribution f(i), i=1..N, if an
ensemble of M events is drawn?Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
Guessing probability distributions from small samples
We propose a new method for the calculation of the statistical properties, as
e.g. the entropy, of unknown generators of symbolic sequences. The probability
distribution of the elements of a population can be approximated by
the frequencies of a sample provided the sample is long enough so that
each element occurs many times. Our method yields an approximation if this
precondition does not hold. For a given we recalculate the Zipf--ordered
probability distribution by optimization of the parameters of a guessed
distribution. We demonstrate that our method yields reliable results.Comment: 10 pages, uuencoded compressed PostScrip
Statistics of finite-time Lyapunov exponents in the Ulam map
The statistical properties of finite-time Lyapunov exponents at the Ulam
point of the logistic map are investigated. The exact analytical expression for
the autocorrelation function of one-step Lyapunov exponents is obtained,
allowing the calculation of the variance of exponents computed over time
intervals of length . The variance anomalously decays as . The
probability density of finite-time exponents noticeably deviates from the
Gaussian shape, decaying with exponential tails and presenting spikes
that narrow and accumulate close to the mean value with increasing . The
asymptotic expression for this probability distribution function is derived. It
provides an adequate smooth approximation to describe numerical histograms
built for not too small , where the finiteness of bin size trimmes the sharp
peaks.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.
On the relationship between directed percolation and the synchronization transition in spatially extended systems
We study the nature of the synchronization transition in spatially extended
systems by discussing a simple stochastic model. An analytic argument is put
forward showing that, in the limit of discontinuous processes, the transition
belongs to the directed percolation (DP) universality class. The analysis is
complemented by a detailed investigation of the dependence of the first passage
time for the amplitude of the difference field on the adopted threshold. We
find the existence of a critical threshold separating the regime controlled by
linear mechanisms from that controlled by collective phenomena. As a result of
this analysis we conclude that the synchronization transition belongs to the DP
class also in continuous models. The conclusions are supported by numerical
checks on coupled map lattices too
Entropy estimates of small data sets
Estimating entropies from limited data series is known to be a non-trivial
task. Naive estimations are plagued with both systematic (bias) and statistical
errors. Here, we present a new 'balanced estimator' for entropy functionals
Shannon, R\'enyi and Tsallis) specially devised to provide a compromise between
low bias and small statistical errors, for short data series. This new
estimator out-performs other currently available ones when the data sets are
small and the probabilities of the possible outputs of the random variable are
not close to zero. Otherwise, other well-known estimators remain a better
choice. The potential range of applicability of this estimator is quite broad
specially for biological and digital data series.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure
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