Transfer entropy between multivariate time series

It is a crucial topic to identify the direction and strength of the interdependence between time series in multivariate systems. In this paper, we propose the method of transfer entropy based on the theory of time-delay reconstruction of a phase space, which is a model free approach to detect causalities in multivariate time series. This method overcomes the limitation that original transfer entropy only can capture which system drives the transition probabilities of another in scalar time series. Using artificial time series, we show that the driving character is obviously reflected with the increase of the coupling strength between two signals and confirm the effectiveness of the method with noise added. Furthermore, we utilize it to real-world data, namely financial time series, in order to characterize the information flow among different stocks. (c) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.