Consider a weather forecast which predicts the weather with two values: sunny and rainy. Let X and Y denote random variables which represent the actual weather and the forecasted weather, respectively. The joint probability distribution of X and Y, PXY, is given as shown in Table 1. Answer the following questions. Use Table 2 to calculate the logarithm.
Table 1: Joint probability distribution of X and Y
(a) Find the entropy of X, H(X), and the entropy of Y, H(Y).
(b) Find the conditional entropy H(X∣Y).
(c) Find the joint entropy H(X,Y).
(d) Find the mutual information of X and Y, I(X;Y).
(e) Explain whether the above weather forecast is useful compared to the case of always predicting sunny, by using the forecast accuracy and the mutual information.
Answer the following questions on additive binary communication channels. The entropy function H(x) may be used.
(a) Find the transition probability matrix of the Markov information source represented by the state transition diagram using probabilities P, Q and states s0, s1 below. This state transition diagram shows, for example, that the probability of transition from state s0 to state s1 is P and that 1 is output at that time.
The state transition diagram corresponds to:
s0→s0: output 0, probability 1−P
s0→s1: output 1, probability P
s1→s0: output 0, probability Q
s1→s1: output 1, probability 1−Q
(b) Find the stationary distribution of the Markov information sources in Question (a).
(c) Find the bit error rate of the additive binary communication channel whose error source SE is the Markov information source in Question (a).
(d) Find the communication channel capacity of the additive binary communication channel in Question (c).
Therefore, the given forecast does not improve the accuracy compared with always predicting sunny.
On the other hand, the mutual information is
I(X;Y)≈0.04 bits,
which is positive. This means that the forecast still contains some information about the actual weather. However, the amount of information is very small.
Hence, this forecast is not useful in terms of prediction accuracy, because it is no better than always predicting sunny, and it is only weakly informative in terms of mutual information.