Consider a binary state and a report with the following joint probability mass function:
Before the report, is strongly favored: its information entropy is bits, where is binary entropy. A report makes the two states equally likely, so bit, strictly larger than before. This report occurs with probability . The more common report determines , giving . Therefore the averaged conditional entropy is
The resulting mutual information is bits. The rare report increases uncertainty about the state; that increase does not make the report useless. Together the reports remove uncertainty on average. These are stipulated probabilities in an exact model, not measured frequencies.
Figure 1.
A rare report raises entropy although the weighted average falls
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