Multiscale Structure of More-than-Binary Variables

Understand

In earlier work, my colleagues and I developed a formalism for using information theory to understand scales of organization and structure in multi-component systems.

• One prominent theme of that work was that the structure of a system cannot always be decomposed into pairwise relationships.
• In this brief communication, I refine that formalism to address recent examples which bring out that theme in a novel and subtle way.
• After summarizing key points of earlier papers, I introduce the crucial new concept of an ancilla component, and I apply this refinement of our formalism to illustrative examples.