Computing the Functional Information in Cancer

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

Visualizing Different Types of Information

@swamidass

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See that there are three types of information.

1. Total Information , or just information content of an entity (the area of a circle)
2. Mutual information , or the shared information between two entities (the overlap between the two circles)
3. Conditional Information , or the information required for one entity, if we know another entity (the non-overlapping area of one of the circles).

We are going to use this visual language to make sense of cancer. The circles will each represent a genome, the starting human genome, and the mutated cancer genomes. The area of overlaps between circles quantify the amount of mutual information, related to the sequence in common, between genome circles.