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Measures of Information and Uncertainty

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Part of the book series: Texts in Applied Mathematics ((TAM,volume 63))

Abstract

This chapter briefly summarizes some basic numerical measures of uncertainty, from interval bounds to information-theoretic quantities such as (Shannon) information and entropy. This discussion then naturally leads to consideration of distances (and distance-like functions) between probability measures.

As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

Donald Rumsfeld

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Sullivan, T.J. (2015). Measures of Information and Uncertainty. In: Introduction to Uncertainty Quantification. Texts in Applied Mathematics, vol 63. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23395-6_5

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