Correlation integral explained

In chaos theory, the correlation integral is the mean probability that the states at two different times are close:

C(\varepsilon)=\limN

1
N2

\sum\stackrel{i,j=1{ij}}N\Theta(\varepsilon-\|\vec{x}(i)-\vec{x}(j)\|),\vec{x}(i)\inRm,

where

N

is the number of considered states

\vec{x}(i)

,

\varepsilon

is a threshold distance,

\|\|

a norm (e.g. Euclidean norm) and

\Theta()

the Heaviside step function. If only a time series is available, the phase space can be reconstructed by using a time delay embedding (see Takens' theorem):

\vec{x}(i)=(u(i),u(i+\tau),\ldots,u(i+\tau(m-1))),

where

u(i)

is the time series,

m

the embedding dimension and

\tau

the time delay.

The correlation integral is used to estimate the correlation dimension.

An estimator of the correlation integral is the correlation sum:

C(\varepsilon)=

1
N2

\sum\stackrel{i,j=1{ij}}N\Theta(\varepsilon-\|\vec{x}(i)-\vec{x}(j)\|),\vec{x}(i)\inRm.

See also

References