Exploratory Data Analysis Using Fisher Information

"Sustainability" is often used in a qualitative sense. However, there is at present a great need to quantitatively measure (and monitor) its many qualitative aspects in real systems. Real systems are regarded as sustainable if they can maintain their current, desirable productivity and character without creating unfavorable condi­ tions elsewhere or in the future [1-4]. Sustainability therefore incorporates both concern for the future of the current system (temporal sustainability) and concern about the degree to which some areas and cultures of the planet are improved at the expense of other areas and cultures (spatial sustainability). That is, sustainability is to hold over both space and time. Sustainability encompasses many disciplines. For example, economic systems are not sustainable if they degrade their natural resource base and impoverish some sectors of the human population [5, 6]. Indices are needed that will measure sustainability through time, and over space, at several scales. These indices must also have the ability to aggregate the many disciplinary facets of sustainability, often incorporatedthrough a large number of environmental, social, and economic variables. Such a multidisciplinary dynamic system can be regarded as sustainable if it maintains a desirable steady state or regime', including fluctuations that are desirable (such as those that respond to natural disturbances [8]).

to Fisher Information: Its Origin, Uses, and Predictions.- Financial Economics from Fisher Information.- Growth Characteristics of Organisms.- Information and Thermal Physics.- Parallel Information Phenomena of Biology and Astrophysics.- Encryption of Covert Information Through a Fisher Game.- Applications of Fisher Information to the Management of Sustainable Environmental Systems.- Fisher Information in Ecological Systems.- Sociohistory: An Information Theory of Social Changef.

Professor Emeritus - B. Roy Frieden:

B.S., M.S., Ph.D., Professor of Optical Sciences, Univ. of Arizona 1966-2002; books "Probability, Statistical Optics and Data Testing" (Springer-Verlag, 3^rd ed., 2001), "Physics from Fisher Information" (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), "Science from Fisher Information" (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004); inventor of principle of Extreme physical information (EPI)

Dr. Robert A. Gatenby:

BSE, Princeton Univ. MD, University of Pennsylvania.