Report on the impact of On-line Filtering on the Discovery Potential

The report provides a brief summary of the findings of work on data irreversibility related
to the impact of the on-line filtering of data on the potential to discover yet unkown and
perhaps even unexpected signals. For the time being we focus on radio astronomical data
streams to develop approaches and methods to evaluate the impact of on-line filtering on
the discovery potential. We found an unified approach to describe the filtering of different
kinds and identified preliminary approaches to measure the amount of information in data
streams in the framework of the Shannon information theory. We present a possible way to
generalize the signal detection procedure in the context of the statistical signal detection and
show a particular example how this generalization influences the signal discovery potential.