Measurement and Control of Information Content in Electrochemical Experiments.

One of the most important problems in chemical analysis is the interpretation of analytical data. The difficulty of this task has been further compounded by the data explosion. Chemical information relevant to the particular analysis problem is hidden within excessive amounts of data. This problem could be alleviated through knowledge and control of the information content of the data. Information theory provides a means for the definition, evaluation, and manipulation of quantitative information content measurements. This paper provides a general review of some of the basic concepts in information theory, including history, terminology, entropy, and other information content measures. The application of information theory to chemical problems requires some modifications. The analyst is usually only interested in a subset of the information (data) which has been collected. Also, this relevant chemical information is dependent upon not only the informational goals of the problem, but the completely specified procedure as well. This paper reviews chemical applications of information theory which have been reported in the literature including applications to qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis, structural analysis, and analytical techniques. Measures of information and information content and figures of merit for performance evaluations are discussed. The paper concludes with a detailed discussion of the application of information theory to electrochemical experiments and the empirical determination of the information content of electroanalytical data.