Logistic Map - Chaos and The Logistic Map

Chaos and The Logistic Map

The relative simplicity of the logistic map makes it an excellent point of entry into a consideration of the concept of chaos. A rough description of chaos is that chaotic systems exhibit a great sensitivity to initial conditions—a property of the logistic map for most values of r between about 3.57 and 4 (as noted above). A common source of such sensitivity to initial conditions is that the map represents a repeated folding and stretching of the space on which it is defined. In the case of the logistic map, the quadratic difference equation (1) describing it may be thought of as a stretching-and-folding operation on the interval (0,1).

The following figure illustrates the stretching and folding over a sequence of iterates of the map. Figure (a), left, gives a two-dimensional phase diagram of the logistic map for r=4, and clearly shows the quadratic curve of the difference equation (1). However, we can embed the same sequence in a three-dimensional phase space, in order to investigate the deeper structure of the map. Figure (b), right, demonstrates this, showing how initially nearby points begin to diverge, particularly in those regions of X_t corresponding to the steeper sections of the plot.

This stretching-and-folding does not just produce a gradual divergence of the sequences of iterates, but an exponential divergence (see Lyapunov exponents), evidenced also by the complexity and unpredictability of the chaotic logistic map. In fact, exponential divergence of sequences of iterates explains the connection between chaos and unpredictability: a small error in the supposed initial state of the system will tend to correspond to a large error later in its evolution. Hence, predictions about future states become progressively (indeed, exponentially) worse when there are even very small errors in our knowledge of the initial state.

Since the map is confined to an interval on the real number line, its dimension is less than or equal to unity. Numerical estimates yield a correlation dimension of 0.500 ± 0.005 (Grassberger, 1983), a Hausdorff dimension of about 0.538 (Grassberger 1981), and an information dimension of 0.5170976... (Grassberger 1983) for r=3.5699456... (onset of chaos). Note: It can be shown that the correlation dimension is certainly between 0.4926 and 0.5024.

It is often possible, however, to make precise and accurate statements about the likelihood of a future state in a chaotic system. If a (possibly chaotic) dynamical system has an attractor, then there exists a probability measure that gives the long-run proportion of time spent by the system in the various regions of the attractor. In the case of the logistic map with parameter r = 4 and an initial state in (0,1), the attractor is also the interval (0,1) and the probability measure corresponds to the beta distribution with parameters a = 0.5 and b = 0.5. Specifically, the invariant measure is . Unpredictability is not randomness, but in some circumstances looks very much like it. Hence, and fortunately, even if we know very little about the initial state of the logistic map (or some other chaotic system), we can still say something about the distribution of states a long time into the future, and use this knowledge to inform decisions based on the state of the system.