InformationTheoryTools

MABE provides a collection of tools built from Shannon Entropy. At its core, Shannon Entropy defines the amount of uncertainty present in a collection of states of a variable. If the order of the states of the variable is also known then multiple variables can be considered to determine if there are relationships between their states. The primary reason for these tools is to analyze brains, and while some of the functions (particularly in the Brain Infomation Tools section), the majority of these tools can be applied to data sets collected from other sources.

The Information Theory Tools are divided into the following categories:

  TimeSeries - defines containers to hold variable states, and manipulate and display these states

  Entropy Functions - provides functions to calculate Entropy, Mutual (i.e. Shared) Entropy, Conditional Entropy, and Condition Mutual Entropy given Time Series.

  Smearing - provides functions to calculate Smearing, which is a measure of how much information individual nodes (in brains) know about some features, and how distributed or localized this information is

  Fragmentation - provides functions to determine how much how information is fragmented within networks (i.e. brains)

  State to State - converts TimeSeries into state to state visualizations

  Brain Infomation Tools - provides brain aware wrapper functions

World Builders Guide to using these tools

In order to use the information theory tools on brains, world builders must add the following:

Before agent evaluation begins every brain that will be analyzed must be told to start recording its activity:

[brain]->setRecordActivity(true);

TS::intTimeSeries worldStateSet;

resetStatesAndLifetimes