Information Theory
Course outline:
An introduction to information theory and basic coding theory for non-experts. The emphasis is on building intuition for the fundamental structure of the theory. We will cover necessary basic probability, and move to definitions of entropy and mutual information. Applications of these ideas to lossless encoding, channel transmission, and data compression will be explored. Near the end of the course we will do a literature survey of recent attempts to apply information-theoretic ideas to understand biological systems.
Prerequisites: Basic (school-level) knowledge of pre-calculus, calculus, and probability theory will be rather useful. For the initial lectures I intend to stick very closely to the textbook, Cover and Thomas. Grades will be based on homeworks, possibly a midterm exam, and a final project.