Permutation entropy: A nonlinear statistical measure for status characterization of rotary machines

Techniques to determine changing system complexity from data are evaluated. Convergence of a frequently used correlation dimension algorithm to a finite value does not necessarily imply an underlying deterministic model or chaos. Analysis of a recently developed family of formulas and statistics, approximate entropy (ApEn), suggests that ApEn can classify complex systems, given at least 1000 data values in diverse settings that include both deterministic chaotic and stochastic processes. The capability to discern changing complexity from such a relatively small amount of data holds promise for applications of ApEn in a variety of contexts.

We introduce complexity parameters for time series based on comparison of neighboring values. The definition directly applies to arbitrary real-world data. For some well-known chaotic dynamical systems it is shown that our complexity behaves similar to Lyapunov exponents, and is particularly useful in the presence of dynamical or observational noise. The advantages of our method are its simplicity, extremely fast calculation, robustness, and invariance with respect to nonlinear monotonous transformations.