From ancient soothsayers and astrologists to today s pollsters and economists, probability theory has long been used to predict the future on the basis of past and present knowledge. Mathematical Models of Information and Stochastic Systems shows that the amount of knowledge about a system plays an important role in the mathematical models used to foretell the future of the system. It explains how this known quantity of information is used to derive a system s probabilistic properties.

After an introduction, the book presents several basic principles that are employed in...