Alessio Sclocco

Hello :)

I’ve taken an exam those summer called “Information theory” and as a project I’ve developed, with the help of Alfredo Aiello, a program for evaluating entropy (simple, joint and conditional) and mutual information of random variables (and subset of them) from a sample set.

Like every other time I want to share the code (that is licensed with GNU General Public License 3.0) with the whole world, so this is a zip file containing all the code.
There isn’t a makefile right now but you can easily find a way to compile it, the only external dependencies is my ArgumentList library.

After compiling it you can use it on command line just tiping:

./ITA <[-e] | [-j] | [-c] | [-m]> -n <null_char> <set_file> <input_file> <output_file>

Obviously you have to call your binary :)

The first parameter is for the operation wanted (-e for entropy, -j for joint entropy, -c for conditional entropy and -m for mutual information), the second is for setting the null char of the sample set and last three ones are filename.
The first of them (set_file) permits you to control which variable of the sample set is in which subset, I know I can be a little too enigmatic but I’ll provide an example later; the second (input_file)  is the file which contains the sample set and the third (output_file) is where do you want the output will be written.

The sample set format is really sample, is a text file where the columns are the variable and the rows are the samples, something like that:

1 0 n 1
n 2 n n
a 0 2 2
2 c 1 2

This is the description of a sample set with 4 samples and 4 variables.
The format for the set_file is really simple too, again a text file where the first number is the length of first subset and all the others are the indexes (starting from 0) of the columns in the subset.

Let’s for example evaluate the conditional entropy between those two subset of the previously given sample set:

X = {0, 2, 3}
Y = {1}

Then we’ll have to write a file (let’s call it example.set) like this one:

3 0 2 3 1

And, if our sample set is called example.txt, call the program in that way:

./ITA -c -n n example.set example.txt out.txt

Enjoy!

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Tags: Code, Cpp, Information theory, University

This entry was posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 12:49 and is filed under Code. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.