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Common values of b are 2, Euler's number e, and 10, and the unit of entropy is shannon (or bit) for b = 2, nat for b = e, and hartley for b = 10. [ 1 ] Mathematically H may also be seen as an average information, taken over the message space, because when a certain message occurs with probability p i , the information quantity −log( p i ...
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 ...
If the natural logarithm is used, the unit of mutual information is the nat. If the log base 2 is used, the unit of mutual information is the shannon, also known as the bit. If the log base 10 is used, the unit of mutual information is the hartley, also known as the ban or the dit.
This equation gives the entropy in the units of "bits" (per symbol) because it uses a logarithm of base 2, and this base-2 measure of entropy has sometimes been called the shannon in his honor. Entropy is also commonly computed using the natural logarithm (base e, where e is Euler's number), which produces a measurement of entropy in nats per ...
The entropy of mixing is also proportional to the Shannon entropy or compositional uncertainty of information theory, which is defined without requiring Stirling's approximation. Claude Shannon introduced this expression for use in information theory, but similar formulas can be found as far back as the work of Ludwig Boltzmann and J. Willard ...
The choice of logarithmic base in the following formulae determines the unit of information entropy that is used. The most common unit of information is the bit, or more correctly the shannon, [2] based on the binary logarithm. Although bit is more frequently used in place of shannon, its name is not distinguished from the bit as used in data ...
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 .