Correlation based on binary events

I have a system with 5 components. Every 10 seconds the signal travels to all of them and I know how many of them responded. I need to know there there is a correlation in response. So, my time series data looks something like:

    A    B    C    D    E
    -----------------------
    1    0    1    1    1
    1    1    1    1    1
    1    0    0    0    1
    1    0    1    0    1

............ there are about 10,000 rows

Can I use a simple correlation function to see if there is correlation between occurrences of the above 5. Or is there a better way for this?

Thanks guys

Answer 1

[Shashank Prasanna]

I suppose there are many ways to quantify, but you could try to compute the Mutual Information which gives a measure of the average amount of decrease of the randomness of say A by observing B.

[Sam Da]

Please explain what do you mean by above?

Thanks

[Shashank Prasanna]

This metric may or may not applicable to your use case but wikipedia has more information on what I am talking about:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_information