Searching for structure in collective systems

From fish schools and bird flocks to biofilms and neural networks, collective systems in nature are made up of many mutually influencing individuals that interact locally to produce large-scale coordinated behavior. Although coordination is central to what it means to behave collectively, measures of large-scale coordination in these systems are ad hoc and system specific. The lack of a common quantitative scale makes broad cross-system comparisons difficult. Here we identify a system-independent measure of coordination based on an information-theoretic measure of multivariate dependence and show it can be used in practice to give a new view of even classic, well-studied collective systems. Moreover, we use this measure to derive a novel method for finding the most coordinated components within a system and demonstrate how this can be used in practice to reveal intrasystem organizational structure.