epsilon-machines

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