APA Dictionary of Psychology

entropy

Updated on 04/19/2018

a thermodynamic quantity providing a measure of the unavailability of the energy of a closed system to do work.
in statistics, an indication of the degree of disorder, disequilibrium, or change of a closed system. For example, an entropy measure may be used to indicate the quality of classification in a cluster analysis. Clusters with high similarity would have low entropy, whereas clusters with more dispersion would have higher entropy.
in information theory, a measure of the efficiency with which a system transmits information.

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