In this letter we discuss some properties of order patterns both in deterministic and random orbit generation. As it turns out, the orbits of one-dimensional maps have always forbidden patterns, i.e., order patterns that cannot occur, in contrast with random time series, in which any order pattern appears with probability one. However, finite random sequences may exhibit "false" forbidden patterns with non-vanishing probability. In this case, forbidden patterns decay with the sequence length, thus unveiling the random nature of the sequence. Last but not least, true forbidden patterns are robust against noise and disintegrate with a rate that depends on the noise level. These properties can be embodied in a simple method to distinguish deterministic, finite time series with very high levels of observational noise, from random ones. We present numerical evidence for white noise.

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Normalized Lempel-Ziv complexity, which measures the generation rate of new patterns along a digital sequence, is closely related to such important source properties as entropy and compression ratio, but, in contrast to these, it is a property of individual sequences. In this article, we propose to exploit this concept to estimate (or, at least, to bound from below) the entropy of neural discharges (spike trains). The main advantages of this method include fast convergence of the estimator (as supported by numerical simulation) and the fact that there is no need to know the probability law of the process generating the signal. Furthermore, we present numerical and experimental comparisons of the new method against the standard method based on word frequencies, providing evidence that this new approach is an alternative entropy estimator for binned spike trains.

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