# Talk:Rate–distortion theory

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Field:  Applied mathematics

The next thing to discuss is decorrelating the images, for example using the K-L transform, and you can then treat them as independent/memoryless...

I wish the page was a little more coherent and organized - for example D* is presented at the top of the page but not explained until much later.

[speedplane] I really like the example given on the rate distortion function of a memoryless guassian source... but a reference to the is necessary. Just showing the equation explains little about the intuition.

## Homework problem

I'm not sure the equations for H(Y) and H(Y|X) are correct. I don't understand information theory well enough to correct it, but I'd appreciate it if someone could verify. In particular, from what I can understand ${\displaystyle H(Y)=\int _{\infty }^{-\infty }p(y)\log {\frac {1}{p(y)}}dy}$, taking the integrand evaluated at 0 to be 0. Those are base 2 logs, naturally. This misunderstanding is making doing my homework difficult:-) --Calmofthestorm7 (talk) 17:19, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

I believe your formula is correct, and that there's a minus sign missing in the article (it's usually written with the -log(p) instead of log(1/p), which is the same thing). The log base determines the units; 2 for bits, e for nats. But why not just look in the sources and correct the article, instead of trying to rely on wikipedia, which is never a good idea? Dicklyon (talk) 00:03, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
I went ahead and added a couple of minus signs, but it will take some time studying sources like these to get the article verified and referenced. Dicklyon (talk) 00:20, 27 December 2008 (UTC)