A simpler and elegant algorithm for computing fractal dimension in higher dimensional state space

[摘要] Chaotic systems are now frequently encountered in almost all branches of sciences. Dimension of such systems provides an important measure for easy characterization of dynamics of the systems. Conventional algorithms for computing dimension of such systems in higher dimensional state space face an unavoidable problem of enormous storage requirement. Here we present an algorithm, which uses a simple but very powerful technique and faces no problem in computing dimension in higher dimensional state space. The unique indexing technique of hypercubes, used in this algorithm, provides a clever means to drastically reduce the requirement of storage. It is shown that theoretically this algorithm faces no problem in computing capacity dimension in any dimension of the embedding state space as far as the actual dimension of the attractor is finite. Unlike the existing algorithms, memory requirement offered by this algorithm depends only on the actual dimension of the attractor and has no explicit dependence on the number of data points considered.

[学科分类] 物理（综合）

[关键词] Dimension;chaos;fractal;attractor