Empirical Inference

On the information-theoretic structure of distributed measurements

2011

Conference Paper

ei


The internal structure of a measuring device, which depends on what its components are and how they are organized, determines how it categorizes its inputs. This paper presents a geometric approach to studying the internal structure of measurements performed by distributed systems such as probabilistic cellular automata. It constructs the quale, a family of sections of a suitably defined presheaf, whose elements correspond to the measurements performed by all subsystems of a distributed system. Using the quale we quantify (i) the information generated by a measurement; (ii) the extent to which a measurement is context-dependent; and (iii) whether a measurement is decomposable into independent submeasurements, which turns out to be equivalent to context-dependence. Finally, we show that only indecomposable measurements are more informative than the sum of their submeasurements.

Author(s): Balduzzi, D.
Pages: 1-15
Year: 2011
Month: July
Day: 0
Publisher: Elsevier Science

Department(s): Empirical Inference
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)

Event Name: 7th International Workshop on Developments of Computational Models (DCM 2011)
Event Place: Zürich, Switzerland

Address: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Digital: 0

Links: PDF
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BibTex

@inproceedings{Balduzzi2011_2,
  title = {On the information-theoretic structure of distributed measurements},
  author = {Balduzzi, D.},
  pages = {1-15},
  publisher = {Elsevier Science},
  address = {Amsterdam, Netherlands},
  month = jul,
  year = {2011},
  doi = {},
  month_numeric = {7}
}