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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 ...
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 .
where is the Kullback–Leibler divergence, and is the outer product distribution which assigns probability () to each (,).. Notice, as per property of the Kullback–Leibler divergence, that (;) is equal to zero precisely when the joint distribution coincides with the product of the marginals, i.e. when and are independent (and hence observing tells you nothing about ).
is the channel output symbol (is a sequence of symbols) taken in an alphabet ; W ^ {\displaystyle {\hat {W}}} is the estimate of the transmitted message; f n {\displaystyle f_{n}} is the encoding function for a block of length n {\displaystyle n} ;
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.
For example, a logarithm of base 2 8 = 256 will produce a measurement in bytes per symbol, and a logarithm of base 10 will produce a measurement in decimal digits (or hartleys) per symbol. 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 ...
The Shannon entropy in information theory is sometimes expressed in units of bits per symbol. The physical entropy may be on a "per quantity" basis (h) which is called "intensive" entropy instead of the usual total entropy which is called "extensive" entropy. The "shannons" of a message (Η) are its total "extensive" information entropy and is ...
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: