UNIVERSALITY OF JAYNES APPROACH TO THE EVOLUTION OF TIME-DEPENDENT PROBABILITY-DISTRIBUTIONS

In order to ascertain which are the essential requirements that allow for the application of MaxEnt techniques in connection with evolution problems, we study time-dependent probability distributions governed b y a general, linear evolution equation that admits, as particular inst ances, the Lioville, diffusion and Fokker-Planck ones. A general varia tional principle is introduced and the properties of an appropriately devised MaxEnt ansatz are investigated. The functional relation that g ives the time derivative of the entropy in terms of the time-dependent MaxEnt distribution function is seen to be always of the same form as the one that holds in the case of exact solutions. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.