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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 ...
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:
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 ...
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.
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 ...
Many inequalities can be derived as linear combinations of Shannon inequalities; they are called Shannon-type inequalities or basic information inequalities of Shannon's information measures. [2] The set of vectors that satisfies them is called Γ n {\displaystyle \Gamma _{n}} ; it contains Γ n ∗ {\displaystyle \Gamma _{n}^{*}} .
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.