Shanon Entropy in vcflib

Question

[sv91707]

Hi Does anyone know what it means shanon entropy of flanking sequence with respect to vcf files ? https://github.com/vcflib/vcflib#vcfentropy

Does is measures the complexity of the flanking sequence ? means repetitive sequence have high entropy ?

thanks

Answer 1

[Jean-Karim Heriche]

In information theory, Shannon entropy measures the amount of information as the average uncertainty of an event outcome. As applied to sequences, it can be used to measure sequence variability. Therefore, a repetitive sequence has lower entropy than a random sequence.

Answer 2

[sv91707]

Thanks, I thought so, as I checked a bit. Thanks for the confirmation.