Noise (electronics)In electronics, noise is an unwanted disturbance in an electrical signal. Noise generated by electronic devices varies greatly as it is produced by several different effects. In particular, noise is inherent in physics and central to thermodynamics. Any conductor with electrical resistance will generate thermal noise inherently. The final elimination of thermal noise in electronics can only be achieved cryogenically, and even then quantum noise would remain inherent. Electronic noise is a common component of noise in signal processing.
AttractorIn the mathematical field of dynamical systems, an attractor is a set of states toward which a system tends to evolve, for a wide variety of starting conditions of the system. System values that get close enough to the attractor values remain close even if slightly disturbed. In finite-dimensional systems, the evolving variable may be represented algebraically as an n-dimensional vector. The attractor is a region in n-dimensional space.
Entropy (information theory)In information theory, the entropy of a random variable is the average level of "information", "surprise", or "uncertainty" inherent to the variable's possible outcomes. Given a discrete random variable , which takes values in the alphabet and is distributed according to : where denotes the sum over the variable's possible values. The choice of base for , the logarithm, varies for different applications. Base 2 gives the unit of bits (or "shannons"), while base e gives "natural units" nat, and base 10 gives units of "dits", "bans", or "hartleys".
Shot noiseShot noise or Poisson noise is a type of noise which can be modeled by a Poisson process. In electronics shot noise originates from the discrete nature of electric charge. Shot noise also occurs in photon counting in optical devices, where shot noise is associated with the particle nature of light. In a statistical experiment such as tossing a fair coin and counting the occurrences of heads and tails, the numbers of heads and tails after many throws will differ by only a tiny percentage, while after only a few throws outcomes with a significant excess of heads over tails or vice versa are common; if an experiment with a few throws is repeated over and over, the outcomes will fluctuate a lot.
Additive white Gaussian noiseAdditive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) is a basic noise model used in information theory to mimic the effect of many random processes that occur in nature. The modifiers denote specific characteristics: Additive because it is added to any noise that might be intrinsic to the information system. White refers to the idea that it has uniform power spectral density across the frequency band for the information system. It is an analogy to the color white which may be realized by uniform emissions at all frequencies in the visible spectrum.
Baker's mapIn dynamical systems theory, the baker's map is a chaotic map from the unit square into itself. It is named after a kneading operation that bakers apply to dough: the dough is cut in half, and the two halves are stacked on one another, and compressed. The baker's map can be understood as the bilateral shift operator of a bi-infinite two-state lattice model. The baker's map is topologically conjugate to the horseshoe map. In physics, a chain of coupled baker's maps can be used to model deterministic diffusion.
Algorithmic information theoryAlgorithmic information theory (AIT) is a branch of theoretical computer science that concerns itself with the relationship between computation and information of computably generated objects (as opposed to stochastically generated), such as strings or any other data structure. In other words, it is shown within algorithmic information theory that computational incompressibility "mimics" (except for a constant that only depends on the chosen universal programming language) the relations or inequalities found in information theory.
Symbolic dynamicsIn mathematics, symbolic dynamics is the practice of modeling a topological or smooth dynamical system by a discrete space consisting of infinite sequences of abstract symbols, each of which corresponds to a state of the system, with the dynamics (evolution) given by the shift operator. Formally, a Markov partition is used to provide a finite cover for the smooth system; each set of the cover is associated with a single symbol, and the sequences of symbols result as a trajectory of the system moves from one covering set to another.
Signal-to-noise ratioSignal-to-noise ratio (SNR or S/N) is a measure used in science and engineering that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise. SNR is defined as the ratio of signal power to noise power, often expressed in decibels. A ratio higher than 1:1 (greater than 0 dB) indicates more signal than noise. SNR is an important parameter that affects the performance and quality of systems that process or transmit signals, such as communication systems, audio systems, radar systems, imaging systems, and data acquisition systems.
Communication channelA communication channel refers either to a physical transmission medium such as a wire, or to a logical connection over a multiplexed medium such as a radio channel in telecommunications and computer networking. A channel is used for information transfer of, for example, a digital bit stream, from one or several senders to one or several receivers. A channel has a certain capacity for transmitting information, often measured by its bandwidth in Hz or its data rate in bits per second.
