Reflections on the Past and Future of Integrative Medicine from a Lifelong Student of the Integration of Chinese and Western Medicine

This issue of the Chinese Journal of Integrative Medicine includes a discussion of integrative medicine （IM） from various perspectives. Dr. Andrew Weil provides a comprehensive overview of the field from the US and Western perspectives; doctors Dobos and Tao delineate those aspects of Western IM which relate directly to Traditional Chinese Medicine （TCM）;

AN INFORMATIC APPROACH TO A LONG MEMORY STATIONARY PROCESS

Long memory is an important phenomenon that arises sometimes in the analysis of time series or spatial data.Most of the definitions concerning the long memory of a stationary process are based on the second-order properties of the process.The mutual information between the past and future I_(p−f) of a stationary process represents the information stored in the history of the process which can be used to predict the future.We suggest that a stationary process can be referred to as long memory if its I_(p−f) is infinite.For a stationary process with finite block entropy,I_(p−f) is equal to the excess entropy,which is the summation of redundancies that relate the convergence rate of the conditional(differential)entropy to the entropy rate.Since the definitions of the I_(p−f) and the excess entropy of a stationary process require a very weak moment condition on the distribution of the process,it can be applied to processes whose distributions are without a bounded second moment.A significant property of I_(p−f) is that it is invariant under one-to-one transformation;this enables us to know the I_(p−f) of a stationary process from other processes.For a stationary Gaussian process,the long memory in the sense of mutual information is more strict than that in the sense of covariance.We demonstrate that the I_(p−f) of fractional Gaussian noise is infinite if and only if the Hurst parameter is H∈(1/2,1).