Effects of noise and particle density on pairwise transfer entropy of heading deviations in finite Vicsek flocks

Abstract

The last two decades have ushered in a significant rise in the number of publications that explore the collective behaviors of active-matter systems through field and laboratory experiments, as well as numerical simulations. Particularly, model-free information-theoretic measures such as transfer entropy (TE) have been successfully used to characterize directed information flow in both real-world and synthetic datasets. Here, we report results of pairwise TE analyses applied to heading deviations of Vicsek particles at fixed speed but varying noise and particle density. For all 390 independent SVM flocks considered, we find non-zero TE values across all unique particle pairs, with TE increasing with ρ but at different rates depending on η. Furthermore, the strength of information flow or interactions between particles, as quantified by the magnitude of the net TE, generally decreases with increasing η at fixed ρ, and increases with increasing ρ at fixed η.