Entropy is one of those slippery concepts wherein the same word has been adopted by different scientific disciplines to mean subtly different things. I’d recommend a recent article that attempts to explain for the layperson how these this different meanings arose, and that they overlap at the concept of measuring our ignorance of the state of a system, our inability to predict the state of that system. Here we’ll talk about entropy as a measure of the randomness of a distribution; the more random the distribution, the less our ability to predict its specifics. The distribution of interest for today is the methylation state (methylated or not methylated) at one or more CpG sites on the <a href="https://en.w…
Entropy of DNA Methylation States as the Basis for an Epigenetic Clock
Entropy is one of those slippery concepts wherein the same word has been adopted by different scientific disciplines to mean subtly different things. I’d recommend a recent article that attempts to explain for the layperson how these this different meanings arose, and that they overlap at the concept of measuring our ignorance of the state of a system, our inability to predict the state of that system. Here we’ll talk about entropy as a measure of the randomness of a distribution; the more random the distribution, the less our ability to predict its specifics. The distribution of interest for today is the methylation state (methylated or not methylated) at one or more CpG sites on the <a href="https://en.w…