These notes are based on the material presented in a series of lec tures in the IBM Systems Research Institute (ESRI) in Geneva durJng 1967-1969 to systems engineers working in the design and programming of computer systems for control and monitoring of i nustrial proc esses. The purpose of the lectures and this book is to give a survey of dif ferent approaches in developing models to describe the behavior of the process in terms of controllable variables. It does not cover the theory of control, stability of control systems, nor techniques in data acquisition or problems in instrumentation and sampling. But certain aspects in the organization of data collection and design of experiments are obtained as side products, notably the concept of orthogonality. The reader is assumed to have a working knowledge of elementary prob ability theory and mathematical statistics. Therefore, the text con tains no introduction to these concepts. The author is aware of some inaccuracies in not making proper dis tinction between population parameters and their sample estimates in the text, but this should alw s be evident from the context. The same applies to the occasional replacement of number of degrees of freedom by the number of samples in the data. In practice, computer collected sets of data consist of a high number of samples and the difference between the two is inSignificant."

This book is based on lectures given by the author at the IBM European Systems Research Institute (ESRI) in Geneva. Information Theory on the syntactic level, as introduced by Claude Shannon in 1949, has many limitations when applied to information processing by computers. But in spite of some obvious shortcomings, the underlyin~ principles are of fundamental importance for systems engineers in understanding the nature of the problems of handling information, its acquisition, storage, processing, and interpretation. The lectures, as presented in this book, attempt to give an exposition of the lovical foundation and basic principles, and to provide at the same time a basis for further study in more specific areas of this expan1in~ theory, such as coding, detection, pattern recognition, and filtering. Most of the problems in Appendix C are intended as extensions of the text, while calling for actjve participation by the stu1ent. Some other problems are direct applications of the theory to specific situations. Some problems require extensive numerical calculations. It is assumed in those cases that the student has access to a computer and that he is capable of writing the necessary programs. The stu1ent is assumed to have a good command of the calculus, and of the theory of probability as well as statistics. Therefore no basic mathematical concepts are discussed in this IV book. The Fourier transform and some related mathematical concepts are introduced in Appendix A.