# dit: discrete information theory¶

dit is a Python package for discrete information theory.

## Introduction¶

Information theory is a powerful extension to probability and statistics, quantifying dependencies among arbitrary random variables in a way tha tis consistent and comparable across systems and scales. Information theory was originally developed to quantify how quickly and reliably information could be transmitted across an arbitrary channel. The demands of modern, data-driven science have been coopting and extending these quantities and methods into unknown, multivariate settings where the interpretation and best practices are not known. For example, there are at least four reasonable multivariate generalizations of the mutual information, none of which inherit all the interpretations of the standard bivariate case. Which is best to use is context-dependent. dit implements a vast range of multivariate information measures in an effort to allow information practitioners to study how these various measures behave and interact in a variety of contexts. We hope that having all these measures and techniques implemented in one place will allow the development of robust techniques for the automated quantification of dependencies within a system and concrete interpretation of what those dependencies mean.

For a quick tour, see the Quickstart. Otherwise, work your way through the various sections. Note that all code snippets in this documentation assume that the following lines of code have already been run:

In [1]: In [1]: from __future__ import division # true division for Python 2.7


Contents: