Inferring the roles of individuals in collective systems using information-theoretic measures of influence

Abstract

In collective systems, influence of individuals can permeate an entire group through indirect interactions— complicating any scheme to understand individual roles from observations. A typical approach to understand an individual’s influence on another involves consideration of confounding factors, for example, by conditioning on other individuals outside of the pair. This becomes unfeasible in many cases as the number of individuals increases. In this article, we review some of the unforeseen problems that arise in understanding individual influence in a collective such as single cells, as well as some of the recent works which address these issues using tools from information theory.