Recurrence times, waiting times and universal entropy production estimators

TL;DR

This paper introduces universal estimators for entropy production in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, extending the concept of recurrence and waiting time-based estimators from information theory to physical systems.

Contribution

It develops and analyzes universal entropy production estimators for nonequilibrium systems, bridging information theory methods with statistical mechanics.

Findings

New estimators for entropy production are proposed.

The estimators are shown to be universal and applicable to finite alphabet shifts.

The approach connects information-theoretic measures with physical entropy production.

Abstract

The universal typical-signal estimators of entropy and cross entropy based on the asymptotics of recurrence and waiting times play an important role in information theory. Building on their construction, we introduce and study universal typical-signal estimators of entropy production in the context of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics of one-sided shifts over finite alphabets.