Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The inspiration for adopting the word entropy in information theory came from the close resemblance between Shannon's formula and very similar known formulae from statistical mechanics. In statistical thermodynamics the most general formula for the thermodynamic entropy S of a thermodynamic system is the Gibbs entropy
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.
Shannon originally wrote down the following formula for the entropy of a continuous distribution, known as differential entropy: = ().Unlike Shannon's formula for the discrete entropy, however, this is not the result of any derivation (Shannon simply replaced the summation symbol in the discrete version with an integral), and it lacks many of the properties that make the discrete entropy a ...
Many of the concepts in information theory have separate definitions and formulas for continuous and discrete cases. For example, entropy is usually defined for discrete random variables, whereas for continuous random variables the related concept of differential entropy, written (), is used (see Cover and Thomas, 2006, chapter 8).
Entropy is a scientific concept that is most commonly associated with a state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty. The term and the concept are used in diverse fields, from classical thermodynamics, where it was first recognized, to the microscopic description of nature in statistical physics, and to the principles of information theory.
The mathematical theory of information is based on probability theory and statistics, and measures information with several quantities of information. The choice of logarithmic base in the following formulae determines the unit of information entropy that is used.
Entropy of a Bernoulli trial (in shannons) as a function of binary outcome probability, called the binary entropy function. In information theory, the binary entropy function, denoted or (), is defined as the entropy of a Bernoulli process (i.i.d. binary variable) with probability of one of two values, and is given by the formula:
In information theory, the Rényi entropy is a quantity that generalizes various notions of entropy, including Hartley entropy, Shannon entropy, collision entropy, and min-entropy. The Rényi entropy is named after Alfréd Rényi , who looked for the most general way to quantify information while preserving additivity for independent events.