Phenomenological approach to reduced description of large-scale systems. I. Description of the approach

A phenomenological approach is proposed to reduced description of large-scale systems whose micro-description calls for introduction of a Markov process with a large mumber of states. The reduction is achieved by approximate parametrization of the Markov process distribution and using approximate equations for the associated set of parameters. The principle of maximal entropy is applied as a heuristic technique in orider to secure a parametrizations readily useful in computation.