Measuring Complexity through Average Symmetry

Review article of various complexity measures of networks

Precisely quantifying the heterogeneity or disorder of a network system is very important and desired in studies of behavior and function of the network system. Although many degree-based entropies have been proposed to measure the heterogeneity of real networks, heterogeneity implicated in the structure of networks can not be precisely quantified yet. Hence, we propose a new structure entropy based on automorphism partition to precisely quantify the structural heterogeneity ...

We review possible measures of complexity which might in particular be applicable to situations where the complexity seems to arise spontaneously. We point out that not all of them correspond to the intuitive (or "naive") notion, and that one should not expect a unique observable of complexity. One of the main problems is to distinguish complex from disordered systems. This and the fact that complexity is closely related to information requires that we also give a review of i...

At present, there is a great deal of confusion regarding complexity and its measures (reviews on complexity measures are found in, e.g. Lloyd, 2001 and Shalizi, 2006 and more references therein). Moreover, there is also confusion regarding the nature of life. In this situation, it seems the task of determining the fundamental complexity measures of life is especially difficult. Yet this task is just part of a greater task: obtaining substantial insights into the nature of bio...

This article summarises a Web-book on "Complexity" that was developed to introduce undergraduate students to interesting complex systems in the biological, physical and social sciences, and the common tools, principles and concepts used for their study.

In this chapter, a statistical measure of complexity is introduced and some of its properties are discussed. Also, some straightforward applications are shown.

We present a complexity measure for any finite time series. This measure has invariance under any monotonic transformation of the time series, has a degree of robustness against noise, and has the adaptability of satisfying almost all the widely accepted but conflicting criteria for complexity measurements. Surprisingly, the measure is developed from Kolmogorov complexity, which is traditionally believed to represent only randomness and to satisfy one criterion to the exclusi...

We discuss the fundamental theoretical framework together with numerous results obtained by the authors and colleagues over an extended period of investigation on the Information Geometric Approach to Chaos (IGAC).

We present a quantitative measure of physical complexity, based on the amount of information required to build a given physical structure through self-assembly. Our procedure can be adapted to any given geometry, and thus to any given type of physical system. We illustrate our approach using self-assembling polyominoes, and demonstrate the breadth of its potential applications by quantifying the physical complexity of molecules and protein complexes. This measure is particula...

While intuitive for humans, the concept of visual complexity is hard to define and quantify formally. We suggest adopting the multi-scale structural complexity (MSSC) measure, an approach that defines structural complexity of an object as the amount of dissimilarities between distinct scales in its hierarchical organization. In this work, we apply MSSC to the case of visual stimuli, using an open dataset of images with subjective complexity scores obtained from human particip...