What is in a name? On the misuse of information theoretic dispersion measures as design complexity metrics

2013 ◽  
Vol 24 (9) ◽  
pp. 662-680 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jami J. Shah ◽  
George Runger
Author(s):  
Jami J. Shah ◽  
George Runger

Complexity is defined as a quality of an object with many interwoven elements, aspects, details, or attributes that makes the whole object difficult to understand in a collective sense. Many measures of design complexity have been proposed in the literature. Of these the most popular are Information-theoretic metrics, such as Information Content based on Suh’s Axiomatic Theory and Entropy based on Shannon’s Information Theory. In this paper we will show that not only these metrics do not provide common sense measures of complexity, but they also do not possess proper mathematical properties. At best, they are geared towards measuring a designs goodness of fit rather than its complexity. It is hoped that this paper will generate some debate on strongly held beliefs in the design theory community.


Author(s):  
Lourdes A. Medina ◽  
Marija Jankovic ◽  
Gül E. Okudan Kremer

Product complexity has been studied as an important factor to decrease the cost and time of the development process. With this purpose, prior research has included the development of design complexity metrics as a method to assess and decrease complexity. Recent studies have also focused on the comparison of complexity metrics for the particular case of medical devices development (MDD). However, the major issue relevant to MDD has not been addressed; the relationship between FDA regulations and the device complexity is not clarified. Therefore, to increase MDD safety and decrease the time to market, we must understand the regulatory decision process and rules. In this paper, we investigate the relation between different complexity metrics and FDA’s decision time using a sample of 100 hip replacement devices. Bayesian network learning is used to explore in detail local relationships between different variables, both complexity measures and product variables. This relationship was found significant for the first two clusters of the analysis. However, for a third cluster it is speculated that FDA decision time does not depend solely upon the degree of medical device complexity. Company or organization relevant variables could be playing a greater role than just complexity. Additional questions are drawn based on the results that must be investigated.


Author(s):  
Ryan Ka Yau Lai ◽  
Youngah Do

This article explores a method of creating confidence bounds for information-theoretic measures in linguistics, such as entropy, Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KLD), and mutual information. We show that a useful measure of uncertainty can be derived from simple statistical principles, namely the asymptotic distribution of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) and the delta method. Three case studies from phonology and corpus linguistics are used to demonstrate how to apply it and examine its robustness against common violations of its assumptions in linguistics, such as insufficient sample size and non-independence of data points.


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