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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 ...
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 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 h times the number of bits in the message.
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 entropy (in nats) is: = = = and if entropy is measured in units of per nat, then the entropy is given by: = which is the Boltzmann entropy formula, where is the Boltzmann constant, which may be interpreted as the thermodynamic entropy per nat.
In information theory, the source coding theorem (Shannon 1948) [2] informally states that (MacKay 2003, pg. 81, [3] Cover 2006, Chapter 5 [4]): N i.i.d. random variables each with entropy H(X) can be compressed into more than N H(X) bits with negligible risk of information loss, as N → ∞; but conversely, if they are compressed into fewer than N H(X) bits it is virtually certain that ...
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.
Information-theoretic analysis of communication systems that incorporate feedback is more complicated and challenging than without feedback. Possibly, this was the reason C.E. Shannon chose feedback as the subject of the first Shannon Lecture, delivered at the 1973 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory in Ashkelon, Israel.