Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The concept of information entropy was introduced by Claude Shannon in his 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", [2] [3] and is also referred to as Shannon entropy. Shannon's theory defines a data communication system composed of three elements: a source of data, a communication channel, and a receiver. The "fundamental problem ...
The shannon also serves as a unit of the information entropy of an event, which is defined as the expected value of the information content of the event (i.e., the probability-weighted average of the information content of all potential events). Given a number of possible outcomes, unlike information content, the entropy has an upper bound ...
In information theory, the conditional entropy quantifies the amount of information needed to describe the outcome of a random variable given that the value of another random variable is known. Here, information is measured in shannons , nats , or hartleys .
Despite the foregoing, there is a difference between the two quantities. The information entropy Η can be calculated for any probability distribution (if the "message" is taken to be that the event i which had probability p i occurred, out of the space of the events possible), while the thermodynamic entropy S refers to thermodynamic probabilities p i specifically.
Intuitively, the entropy H X of a discrete random variable X is a measure of the amount of uncertainty associated with the value of X when only its distribution is known. The entropy of a source that emits a sequence of N symbols that are independent and identically distributed (iid) is N ⋅ H bits (per message of N symbols).
Here is the formal definition of each element (where the only difference with respect to the nonfeedback capacity is the encoder definition): W {\displaystyle W} is the message to be transmitted, taken in an alphabet W {\displaystyle {\mathcal {W}}} ;
Although, in both cases, mutual information expresses the number of bits of information common to the two sources in question, the analogy does not imply identical properties; for example, differential entropy may be negative. The differential analogies of entropy, joint entropy, conditional entropy, and mutual information are defined as follows:
In information theory, Shannon's source coding theorem (or noiseless coding theorem) establishes the statistical limits to possible data compression for data whose source is an independent identically-distributed random variable, and the operational meaning of the Shannon entropy. Named after Claude Shannon, the source coding theorem shows that ...