Two central concepts in information theory are those of entropy and mutual in-formation. Lastly, the chain rule of entropy is the analog of the inclusion exclusion principle in this analogy. A simple physical example (gases) 36. $\begingroup$ @QiaochuYuan I'm guessing it's impossible to 'prove' formally why entropy in theory of information is defined this way. Learning the entropy information theory in calculus is a good way to understand how probability works and how many of the data systems you encounter produce various amounts of information. Along the way, well give some intuitive reasoning behind these values in addition to the formulas. Information theory - Information theory - Entropy: Shannons concept of entropy can now be taken up. The gure above brings out a nice analogy with sets. discusses statistical mechanics from an information theory point of view. Analog channels 103. The Gibbs inequality 28. Shannons communication theory 47. To do so, the transmitter sends a series (possibly just one) partial messages that give clues towards the original message. Similarly, in information theory, one may use various encoding alphabets to communicate random events; however, the inherent information associated with the event is invariant. Examples using Bayes Theorem 87. Recall that the table Comparison of two encodings from M to S showed that the second encoding scheme would transmit an average of 5.7 characters from M per second. A Maximum Entropy Principle 108. information theory has found a wide range of applications, including coding theory, LP hierarchies, and quantum computing. Although entropy originated from statistical mechanics, within physics, it is more generally applicable and better understood from the perspective of information theory. In summary, entropy is a concept with wide ranging applications in information theory and physics. His discussion of probability and entropy is excellent and he does a nice job motivating the de nition of the Shannon entropy. Previous Next Some other measures 79. In this lecture, well cover the basic de nitions of entropy, mutual information, and the Kullback-Leibler divergence. In information theory, the major goal is for one person (a transmitter) to convey some message (over a channel) to another person (the receiver). The information content of one of these partial messages is a measure of how much uncertainty this resolves for the receiver. But suppose that, instead of the distribution of characters shown in the table, a long series of As were transmitted. Rather, we should start with an intuitive concept and try to define a mathematical formula satisfying the properties we want it to satisfy in the informal sense. So 'informal' answers are the most formal. Basics of information theory 15. The joint entropy is the analog of the union while the mutual information is analogous to the intersection. Application to Biology (genomes) 63. Information & Entropy Information Equation p = probability of the event happening b = base (base 2 is mostly used in information theory) *unit of information is determined by base base 2 = bits base 3 = trits base 10 = Hartleys base e = nats The former can be interpreted in various ways and is related to concepts with the same name in other elds, including statistical mechanics, topological dy-namics and ergodic theory. Tags: entropy, information theory, tutorial. H(YjX) is analogous to X[YnX(note the similarity in the formula H(X;Y) H(X) = H(YjX)). Some additional material. In the next post, I hope to make these ideas more clear by rigorously outlining Shannons Source Coding Thoerem. Some entropy theory 22. If you have a background in thermodynamic studies, it can make it easier to understand the concept of entropy. In information theory an entropy encoding is a lossless data compression scheme that is independent of the specific characteristics of the medium.. One of the main types of entropy coding creates and assigns a unique prefix-free code to each unique symbol that occurs in the input.