Space-Time Information Interchangeability in Dynamical Systems: Conditions and Bounds for Replacing Spatial Sensors with Temporal Histories

Abstract

Many dynamical-state reconstruction problems seek to infer a high-dimensional spatial state from measurements at only a few locations. Because the governing dynamics couple evolution across space and time, temporal measurements can contain information about state components beyond the sensor locations. This work develops a theoretical framework comparing the information content of a temporal measurement history with that of a specified instantaneous spatial sensor array. The temporal history and spatial reference array are represented by prior-whitened information operators that account for prior variability, sensor geometry, and measurement noise while preserving the directional distribution of uncertainty reduction. A general space-time information-exchange theorem gives necessary and sufficient conditions for retaining a prescribed fraction of the spatial-reference information in every state direction. It answers three practical questions. First, how many temporal measurements and how much total information are required? Second, is the prescribed fraction attainable, or does a limiting information ceiling rule out every finite history? Third, when attainable, what history length is sufficient? Explicit history-length bounds are derived for contractive, spectrally separated unitary, and simultaneously diagonalizable dissipative linear dynamics, and for stochastic linear estimation under Gaussian process and measurement noise. For nonlinear systems, global delay-map injectivity is combined with a uniform local Fisher-information condition. Numerical experiments test directional exchange lengths, information ceilings, and finite-memory bounds, and assess nonlinear delay-map distinguishability and local Fisher-information predictions. The framework provides an explicit basis for determining when temporal measurements can reduce spatial sensor coverage for full-state reconstruction.