Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Nat (unit)
Summary
The natural unit of information (symbol: nat), sometimes also nit or nepit, is a unit of information or information entropy, based on natural logarithms and powers of e, rather than the powers of 2 and base 2 logarithms, which define the shannon. This unit is also known by its unit symbol, the nat. One nat is the information content of an event when the probability of that event occurring is 1/e.
One nat is equal to 1/ln 2 shannons ≈ 1.44 Sh or, equivalently, 1/ln 10 hartleys ≈ 0.434 Hart.
Boulton and Wallace used the term nit in conjunction with minimum message length, which was subsequently changed by the minimum description length community to nat to avoid confusion with the nit used as a unit of luminance.
Alan Turing used the natural ban.
Shannon entropy (information entropy), being the expected value of the information of an event, is a quantity of the same type and with the same units as information. The International System of Units, by assigning the same units (joule per kelvin) both to heat capacity and to thermodynamic entropy implicitly treats information entropy as a quantity of dimension one, with 1 nat = 1. Physical systems of natural units that normalize the Boltzmann constant to 1 are effectively measuring thermodynamic entropy in nats.
When the Shannon entropy is written using a natural logarithm,
it is implicitly giving a number measured in nats.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.