Overview
- Provides definitions of useful new concepts: description, novelty, surprise, template
- Discusses new viewpoints on information theory in relation to the natural sciences
- Demonstrates a method of analyzing neuronal spike trains (burst surprise)
Part of the book series: Information Science and Statistics (ISS)
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Table of contents (18 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Surprise and Information of Descriptions
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Front Matter
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Coding and Information Transmission
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Front Matter
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Information Rate and Channel Capacity
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Front Matter
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Repertoires and Covers
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Front Matter
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Information, Novelty and Surprise in Science
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Front Matter
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Keywords
About this book
This revised edition offers an approach to information theory that is more general than the classical approach of Shannon. Classically, information is defined 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 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 concepts, mostlyin statistics and in neuroscience.
Authors and Affiliations
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Novelty, Information and Surprise
Authors: Günther Palm
Series Title: Information Science and Statistics
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-65875-8
Publisher: Springer Berlin, Heidelberg
eBook Packages: Mathematics and Statistics, Mathematics and Statistics (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-662-65874-1Published: 03 January 2023
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-662-65877-2Published: 04 January 2024
eBook ISBN: 978-3-662-65875-8Published: 02 January 2023
Series ISSN: 1613-9011
Series E-ISSN: 2197-4128
Edition Number: 2
Number of Pages: XX, 293
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Statistical Theory and Methods, Mathematical and Computational Biology, Biostatistics, Pattern Recognition