Considerations on the information and entropy of ordinal data

This study attempts to establish methods for characterizing the complexity of ordinal data through the information and entropy parameters. In this respect, there were examined the methods for measuring the complexity of data with similar statistical characteristics and the parameters that can make the difference between them were established. For this purpose, the analysis was applied to three data sets with identical overall statistical characteristics but with different order of elements, respectively incremental, random and oscillatory incremental data. The analysis highlighted that it is necessary to include the information and entropy parameters for different variation orders of data elements. In this regard new parameters have been proposed, based on information and entropy expressions that describe, in an adequate way, the complexity of ordinal data.