ArticleFrontiers in robotics and AI2018
Inform: Efficient Information-Theoretic Analysis of Collective Behaviors.
Article in Frontiers in robotics and AI, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Mind Everywhere: A Framework for Conceptualizing Goal-Directedness in Biology and Other Domains-Part Two.Biological theory · 2026Article
- Reward integration in prefrontal-cortical and ventral-hippocampal nucleus accumbens inputs cooperatively modulates engagement.Nature communications · 2025Article
- An improved modeling approach to investigate biases in human random number generation.PloS one · 2025Article
- Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates.Communications biology · 2024Review
- Embryos assist morphogenesis of others through calcium and ATP signaling mechanisms in collective teratogen resistance.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Detection of Anticipatory Dynamics between a Pair of Zebrafish.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Information integration during bioelectric regulation of morphogenesis of the embryonic frog brain.iScience · 2023Article
- Article
- Turn-Taking Mechanisms in Imitative Interaction: Robotic Social Interaction Based on the Free Energy Principle.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Information Theory as an Experimental Tool for Integrating Disparate Biophysical Signaling Modules.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
- Article
- Coordination of movement via complementary interactions of leaders and followers in termite mating pairs.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Predictability limit of partially observed systems.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Emergence of informative higher scales in biological systems: a computational toolkit for optimal prediction and control.Communicative & integrative biology · 2020Article
- Revealing the structure of information flows discriminates similar animal social behaviors.eLife · 2020Article
- Division of labour promotes the spread of information in colony emigrations by the antProceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Zebrafish Adjust Their Behavior in Response to an Interactive Robotic Predator.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2019Article
- Complexity Measures: Open Questions and Novel Opportunities in the Automatic Design and Analysis of Robot Swarms.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2019Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
The study of collective behavior has traditionally relied on a variety of different methodological tools ranging from more theoretical methods such as population or game-theoretic models to empirical ones like Monte Carlo or multi-agent simulations. An approach that is increasingly being explored is the use of information theory as a methodological framework to study the flow of information and the statistical properties of collectives of interacting agents. While a few general purpose toolkits exist, most of the existing software for information theoretic analysis of collective systems is limited in scope. We introduce Inform, an open-source framework for efficient information theoretic analysis that exploits the computational power of a C library while simplifying its use through a variety of wrappers for common higher-level scripting languages. We focus on two such wrappers here: PyInform (Python) and rinform (R). Inform and its wrappers are cross-platform and general-purpose. They include classical information-theoretic measures, measures of information dynamics and information-based methods to study the statistical behavior of collective systems, and expose a lower-level API that allow users to construct measures of their own. We describe the architecture of the Inform framework, study its computational efficiency and use it to analyze three different case studies of collective behavior: biochemical information storage in regenerating planaria, nest-site selection in the ant
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