Phase 3: Advanced Math for AI · ~60 minutes · Python

Information Theory

Information theory measures surprise. Loss functions are built on it.

Hiring signal: Understanding of information theory internals

What you will learn

Compute entropy, cross-entropy, and KL divergence from scratch and explain their relationship
Derive why minimizing cross-entropy loss is equivalent to maximizing log-likelihood
Calculate mutual information between features and a target to rank feature importance
Explain perplexity as the effective vocabulary size a language model chooses from

Introduction

Type: Learn Language: Python Prerequisites: Phase 1, Lesson 06 (Probability) Time: ~60 minutes

Learning Objectives

Compute entropy, cross-entropy, and KL divergence from scratch and explain their relationship
Derive why minimizing cross-entropy loss is equivalent to maximizing log-likelihood
Calculate mutual information between features and a target to rank feature importance
Explain perplexity as the effective vocabulary size a language model chooses from

Unlock the full lesson

You've read the first 2 sections. The rest of this lesson covers The Problem, The Concept, Build It, Use It, Exercises, Key Terms, Further Reading — plus a hands-on lab, quiz, and project artifact.

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