Information Theory answers : How to quantify information ?

Self Information

To measure the information content of an event, Shannon proposed self-information based on 3 axioms:

  • An event with 100% certainty is perfectly unsurprising and yields no information.
  • The less probable an event is, the more surprising it is, so the more information it yields.
  • If two independent events are measured separately, the total amount of information is the sum of the self-information’s of the individual events.