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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 ...
If the base of the logarithm is 2, then the unit of uncertainty is the shannon (more commonly known as bit). If it is the natural logarithm, then the unit is the nat. Hartley used a base-ten logarithm, and with this base, the unit of information is called the hartley (aka ban or dit) in his honor. It is also known as the Hartley entropy or max ...
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).
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 ...
Thus the definitions of entropy in statistical mechanics (The Gibbs entropy formula = ) and in classical thermodynamics (=, and the fundamental thermodynamic relation) are equivalent for microcanonical ensemble, and statistical ensembles describing a thermodynamic system in equilibrium with a reservoir, such as the canonical ensemble, grand ...
It connects Hartley's result with Shannon's channel capacity theorem in a form that is equivalent to specifying the M in Hartley's line rate formula in terms of a signal-to-noise ratio, but achieving reliability through error-correction coding rather than through reliably distinguishable pulse levels.
The Shannon information is closely related to entropy, which is the expected value of the self-information of a random variable, quantifying how surprising the random variable is "on average". This is the average amount of self-information an observer would expect to gain about a random variable when measuring it.
The above definition is for discrete random variables. The continuous version of discrete conditional entropy is called conditional differential (or continuous) entropy. Let and be a continuous random variables with a joint probability density function (,).