Word.ws English Dictionary

epsilon-machine

epsilon-machine noun: a deterministic automaton consisting of a system of causal states and the transitions between them, functioning as the smallest possible maximally predictive model of a stochastic process.

Noun

epsilon-machine (plural epsilon-machines)

  1. A deterministic automaton consisting of a system of causal states and the transitions between them, functioning as the smallest possible maximally predictive model of a stochastic process
    • With a direct measure of an ε-machine’s complexity, the theory gives a computation-theoretic foundation to the notions of model optimality and, most importantly, a measure of the computational complexity of estimated models.1989, James Crutchfield, Karl Young, Inferring Statistical Complexity
    • The ϵ-machine is the organization of the process, or at least of the part of it which is relevant to our measurements. It leads to a natural measure of the statistical complexity of processes, namely the amount of information needed to specify the state of the ϵ-machine. […] Using the ϵ-machine, we...2001, Cosma Rohilla Shalizi, Causal Architecture, Complexity and Self-Organization in Time Series and Cellular Automata

Forms of epsilon-machine

pluralepsilon-machines
alternative formϵ-machine
alternative formε-machine

Origin of epsilon-machine

From epsilon + machine. Coined by James Crutchfield and Karl Young in their 1989 paper “Inferring Statistical Complexity”.

Questions about epsilon-machine

What does epsilon-machine mean?
Epsilon-machine means a deterministic automaton consisting of a system of causal states and the transitions between them, functioning as the smallest possible maximally predictive model of a stochastic process.
What part of speech is epsilon-machine?
Epsilon-machine is a noun.
What is the plural of epsilon-machine?
The plural of epsilon-machine is epsilon-machines.

Words near epsilon-machine in the dictionary

  1. epsilon number
  2. epsilon numbers
  3. Epsilon Pegasi
  4. Epsilon Ursae Majoris
  5. Epsilon variant
  6. epsilon-machine
  7. epsilon-machines
  8. epsilonic
  9. epsilonics
  10. epsilonize
  11. epsilonized

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: epsilon-machine (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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