coalesce: Coalesce

In rinform: An R Wrapper of the 'Inform' C Library for Information Analysis of Complex Systems

Description

Coalesce a time series into as few contiguous states as possible. The magic of information measures is that the actual values of a time series are irrelevant. For example, [0, 1, 0, 1, 1] has the same entropy as [2, 9, 2, 9, 9 (possibly up to a rescaling). This give us the freedom to shift around the values of a time series as long as we do not change the relative number of states. This function thus provides a way of "compressing" a time series into as small a base as possible. Many of the measures use the base of the time series to determine how much memory to allocate; the larger the base, the higher the memory usage. It also affects the overall performance as the combinatorics climb exponentially with the base. The two standard usage cases for this function are to reduce the base of a time series or ensure that the states are non-negative. Notice that the encoding that is used ensures that the ordering of the states stays the same.

Usage

coalesce(series)

Arguments

series

Vector of the time series to coalesce.

Value

List giving the coalesced time series and its base.

Examples

coalesce(c(0, 2, 0, 2, 0, 2))
coalesce(c(-8, 2, 6, -2, 4))

rinform documentation built on April 1, 2018, 12:12 p.m.