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Novelty, Information and Surprise

  • Textbook
  • © 2012

Overview

Authors:
  1. Günther Palm

    1. , Neural Information Processing, University of Ulm, Ulm, Germany

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  • Definition of useful new concepts: description, novelty, surprise, template
  • New viewpoint on information theory in relation to (natural) science
  • New method to analyse neuronal spike trains (burst surprise)
  • Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

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Table of contents (17 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xxiii
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  2. Surprise and Information of Descriptions

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1
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    2. Prerequisites from Logic and Probability Theory

      • Günther Palm
      Pages 3-10

    3. Improbability and Novelty of Descriptions

      • Günther Palm
      Pages 11-34

    4. Conditional and Subjective Novelty and Information

      • Günther Palm
      Pages 35-47

  3. Coding and Information Transmission

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 49-49
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    2. On Guessing and Coding

      • Günther Palm
      Pages 51-62

    3. Information Transmission

      • Günther Palm
      Pages 63-74

  4. Information Rate and Channel Capacity

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 75-75
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    2. Stationary Processes and Their Information Rate

      • Günther Palm
      Pages 77-88

    3. Channel Capacity

      • Günther Palm
      Pages 89-95

    4. How to Transmit Information Reliably with Unreliable Elements (Shannon’s Theorem)

      • Günther Palm
      Pages 97-101

  5. Repertoires and Covers

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 103-103
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    2. Repertoires and Descriptions

      • Günther Palm
      Pages 105-121

    3. Novelty, Information and Surprise of Repertoires

      • Günther Palm
      Pages 123-139

    4. Conditioning, Mutual Information, and Information Gain

      • Günther Palm
      Pages 141-158

  6. Information, Novelty and Surprise in Science

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 159-159
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    2. Information, Novelty, and Surprise in Brain Theory

      • Günther Palm
      Pages 161-188

    3. Surprise from Repetitions and Combination of Surprises

      • Günther Palm
      Pages 189-194

    4. Entropy in Physics

      • Günther Palm
      Pages 195-204
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Keywords

About this book

The book offers a new approach to information theory that is more general then the classical approach by Shannon. The classical definition of information is given for an alphabet of symbols or for a set of mutually exclusive propositions (a partition of the probability space Ω) with corresponding probabilities adding up to 1. The new definition is given for an arbitrary cover of Ω, i.e. for a set of possibly overlapping propositions. The generalized information concept is called novelty and it is accompanied by two new concepts derived from it, designated as information and surprise, which describe "opposite" versions of novelty, information being related more to classical information theory and surprise being related more to the classical concept of statistical significance. In the discussion of these three concepts and their interrelations several properties or classes of covers are defined, which turn out to be lattices. The book also presents applications of these new concepts, mostly in statistics and in neuroscience.

Reviews

From the reviews:

“In this interesting book, the author extends classical Shannon information theory to include the subjective element of interestingness, novelty or surprise. … A theory of novelty and surprise is developed in this book to provide a brief and comprehensive exposition of classical information theory … . all the chapters have exercises, and so this book can be used as an undergraduate/graduate textbook. Since each chapter contains a decent number of references … readers can find research problems from those references.” (Yûichirô Kakihara, Mathematical Reviews, July, 2013)

“In this book the author introduces (subjective) notions of interestingness, novelty and surprise of messages employing probality spaces … . The book is easy to read and does not require strong mathematical background, thus it could be used as a textbook or as material for self-study in graduate or post-graduate courses.” (Jaak Henno, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1257, 2013)

Authors and Affiliations

  • , Neural Information Processing, University of Ulm, Ulm, Germany

    Günther Palm

About the author

Günther Palm studied mathematics in Hamburg and Tübingen. After completing his studies in mathematics (Master in 1974, Ph.D. in 1975) he worked on nonlinear systems, associative memory and brain theory at the MPI for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen. In 1983/84 he was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. From 1988 to 1991 he was professor for theoretical brain research at the University of Düsseldorf. Since then he has served as a professor for computer science and Director of the Institute of Neural Information Processing at the University of Ulm, where his focus is on information theory, pattern recognition, neural networks, and brain modelling.

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