  Entropy has been a common index to quantify the complexity of time series in
a variety of fields. Here, we introduce increment entropy to measure the
complexity of time series in which each increment is mapped into a word of two
letters, one letter corresponding to direction and the other corresponding to
magnitude. The Shannon entropy of the words is termed as increment entropy
(IncrEn). Simulations on synthetic data and tests on epileptic EEG signals have
demonstrated its ability of detecting the abrupt change, regardless of
energetic (e.g. spikes or bursts) or structural changes. The computation of
IncrEn does not make any assumption on time series and it can be applicable to
arbitrary real-world data.
