We generalize the notion of topological pressure to the case of a finitely generated group of continuous maps and introduce group measure entropy. Also, we provide an elementary proof that any finitely generated group of polynomial growth admits a group invariant measure and show that for a group of polynomial growth its measure entropy is less than or equal to its topological entropy. The dynamical properties of groups of polynomial growth are reflected in the dynamics of some foliated spaces.

Entropy-expanding transformations define a class of smooth dynamics generalizing interval maps with positive entropy and expanding maps. In this work, we build a symbolic representation of those dynamics in terms of puzzles (in Yoccoz’s sense), thus avoiding a connectedness condition, hard to satisfy in higher dimensions. Those puzzles are controled by a «constraint entropy» bounded by the hypersurface entropy of the aforementioned transformations.The analysis of those puzzles rests on a «stably...