Lecture

Information Theory: Review and Mutual Information

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In course

COM-622: Topics in information-theoretic cryptography

Information-theoretic methods and their application to secrecy & privacy. Perfect information-theoretic secrecy. Randomness extraction & privacy amplification. Secret key generation from common randomness. Measures of information leakage incl. differential ...

Description

This lecture covers a review of information measures, focusing on entropy and mutual information. It starts by explaining how to model information using tools from probability theory. Then, it explores expressing fundamental limits using information measures as functions of probability distributions, with examples like lossless compression. The lecture delves into the concept of entropy, discussing the number of bits needed to represent a discrete random variable and its lower bound by entropy. Finally, it introduces mutual information, defining it as the measure of the amount of information that one random variable contains about another random variable.

Instructor

Yanina Yurina Shkel

Teaching & PhD PhD Students Serhat Emre Coban, Anuj Kumar Yadav, Cemre Çadir Courses Advanced probability and applications COM-417 In this course, various aspects of probability theory are considered. The first part covers the main theorems in the field (law of large numbers, central limit theorem), while the second part focuses on the theory of martingales and concentration inequalities. Signal processing COM-202 Signal processing theory and applications: discrete and cont

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Information engineering

Information theory: Channel capacity

Statistics

Statistical inference: Mathematical statistics

Related concepts (32)

Mutual information

In probability theory and information theory, the mutual information (MI) of two random variables is a measure of the mutual dependence between the two variables. More specifically, it quantifies the "amount of information" (in units such as shannons (bits), nats or hartleys) obtained about one random variable by observing the other random variable. The concept of mutual information is intimately linked to that of entropy of a random variable, a fundamental notion in information theory that quantifies the expected "amount of information" held in a random variable.

Information

Information is an abstract concept that refers to that which has the power to inform. At the most fundamental level, information pertains to the interpretation (perhaps formally) of that which may be sensed, or their abstractions. Any natural process that is not completely random and any observable pattern in any medium can be said to convey some amount of information. Whereas digital signals and other data use discrete signs to convey information, other phenomena and artefacts such as analogue signals, poems, pictures, music or other sounds, and currents convey information in a more continuous form.

Probability theory

Probability theory or probability calculus is the branch of mathematics concerned with probability. Although there are several different probability interpretations, probability theory treats the concept in a rigorous mathematical manner by expressing it through a set of axioms. Typically these axioms formalise probability in terms of a probability space, which assigns a measure taking values between 0 and 1, termed the probability measure, to a set of outcomes called the sample space.

Entropy (information theory)

In information theory, the entropy of a random variable is the average level of "information", "surprise", or "uncertainty" inherent to the variable's possible outcomes. Given a discrete random variable , which takes values in the alphabet and is distributed according to : where denotes the sum over the variable's possible values. The choice of base for , the logarithm, varies for different applications. Base 2 gives the unit of bits (or "shannons"), while base e gives "natural units" nat, and base 10 gives units of "dits", "bans", or "hartleys".

Information theory

Information theory is the mathematical study of the quantification, storage, and communication of information. The field was originally established by the works of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley, in the 1920s, and Claude Shannon in the 1940s. The field, in applied mathematics, is at the intersection of probability theory, statistics, computer science, statistical mechanics, information engineering, and electrical engineering. A key measure in information theory is entropy.

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