Geometric Partition Entropy: Coarse-Graining a Continuous State Space

Entropy is re-examined as a quantification of ignorance in the predictability of a one dimensional continuous phenomenon. Although traditional estimators for entropy have been widely utilized in this context, we show that both the thermodynamic and Shannon’s theory of entropy are fundamentally discrete, and that the limiting process used to define differential entropy suffers from similar problems to those encountered in thermodynamics. In contrast, we consider a sampled data set to be observations of microstates (unmeasurable in thermodynamics and nonexistent in Shannon’s discrete theory), meaning, in this context, it is the macrostates of the underlying phenomenon that are unknown. To obtain a particular coarse-grained model we define macrostates using quantiles of the sample and define an ignorance density distribution based on the distances between quantiles. The geometric partition entropy is then just the Shannon entropy of this finite distribution. Our measure is more consistent and informative than histogram-binning, especially when applied to complex distributions and those with extreme outliers or under limited sampling. Its computational efficiency and avoidance of negative values can also make it preferable to geometric estimators such as k-nearest neighbors. We suggest applications that are unique to this estimator and illustrate its general utility through an application to time series in the approximation of an ergodic symbolic dynamics from limited observations.