  Transfer entropy is a measure of the magnitude and the direction of
information flow between jointly distributed stochastic processes. In recent
years, its permutation analogues are considered in the literature to estimate
the transfer entropy by counting the number of occurrences of orderings of
values, not the values themselves. It has been suggested that the method of
permutation is easy to implement, computationally low cost and robust to noise
when applying to real world time series data. In this paper, we initiate a
theoretical treatment of the corresponding rates. In particular, we consider
the transfer entropy rate and its permutation analogue, the symbolic transfer
entropy rate, and show that they are equal for any bivariate finite-alphabet
stationary ergodic Markov process. This result is an illustration of the
duality method introduced in [T. Haruna and K. Nakajima, Physica D 240, 1370
(2011)]. We also discuss the relationship among the transfer entropy rate, the
time-delayed mutual information rate and their permutation analogues.
