Information theory - definition
Information theory - definition
Information theory is a mathematical and engineering discipline concerned with the quantitative description of the processes involved in the transmission, storage, encoding and processing of information. The foundations of this theory were formulated in the 1940s by Claude E. Shannon, who proposed a model of communication that considers the information source, transmission channel, coding, interference and receiver. A key objective of information theory is to define the limits of efficient data transmission in the presence of uncertainty and interference.
At the centre of this theory is the concept of information entropy, which measures the amount of disorder or uncertainty associated with a given information source. The higher the entropy, the more information a signal carries, and the greater the difficulty of compressing or predicting it efficiently. Entropy serves as a measure of the theoretical minimum number of bits needed to encode a message without losing information.
Information theory provides Tools for designing transmission systems that maximise the flow of information with limited channel capacity and the presence of noise. In this context, an important concept is channel capacity, which defines the maximum possible rate of data transmission at a given level of interference, without loss of signal integrity. Shannon showed that there are limits below which it is possible to transmit information with an arbitrarily small probability of error, which initiated the development of coding and error correction theory.
Applications of information theory extend beyond classical telecommunications systems to include cryptography, data compression, molecular biology, neuroinformatics, artificial intelligence and learning theory. It enables formal analysis of problems related to the representation, organisation and processing of information in physical, biological and digital systems.
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