Lectures: Johannes Berg
Exercises: Prasanna Bhogale and Chau Nguyen

This lecture course gives an introduction to information theory and statistical inference from the perspective of statistical physics. Topics include

• introduction to probability and information theory
• information theory and the foundations of statistical physics, the principle of maximum entropy
• Maxwell's demon and Szilard's engine
• typical and rare events, the source coding theorem
• statistical inference
• inverse problems, the inverse Ising problem
• information processing in biology: sequence analysis, molecular structure prediction, regulation of gene expression

The course is part of the area of specialization "Statistical and biological physics" of the Master in physics. The BCGS Intensive Week "Physics of Microbes" will offer an introduction to some of the biological topics of this course and is highly recommended.

Lectures:	Monday 16-17:30 st, seminar room of the II Physical Institute Wednesday 12-13:30 st, seminar room Institute for Theoretical Physics
Exercises:	Wednesday 12-13:30 st, seminar room Institute for Theoretical Physics (alternating with lectures)
Beginning:	8.10, 16:00, seminar room of the II Physical Institute
Contact me:	johannes.berg_at_thp.uni-koeln.de

Thomas and Cover, Elements of Information Theory (Wiley)
MacKay, Information theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms (CUP)
Mézard and Montanari, Information, Physics, and Computation (OUP)