Novelty, A Measure of Creative Organization in Natural and Mathematical Time Series

Abstract

This article describes novelty, an operationally-defined measure of creative features in time series. Novelty is measured by comparing the percentage of recurrences of the time series with those of randomized copies: a larger number of recurrences in the shuffled copy indicates novelty, while a de- creased number obtains a periodic series. Novelty is one of the defining features of biotic patterns present in natural processes such as heartbeat interval series and economic time series, or generated by the process equation and related recursions. Novelty differentiates bios from chaos generated by this and most other equations, except for the Rossler attractor. Novelty is also present in Brownian noise (random walk) and in 1/f noise, but these noises can be differentiated from biotic patterns by a number of other tech- niques. Significant technical points regarding the measurement of novelty are presented to allow its computation.