Abstract: A method of identifying pattern in a series of data, or curve, includes: first converting a curve to a permutation by relabelling the data points with their rank; second, segregating the set of all permutations into clusters of different sizes with respect to some map: permutations mapped to the same number are assigned to the same cluster. From this, one can write an alternative description of any curve, from which the original curve can be fully recovered. The length of this description is a bound on its AIC. The difference between this bound and the length of the original curve in bits, or Shannon information of the curve, is the number of bits k by which the curve can be compressed. The compression k is used to order a collection of curves in decreasing order of significance.