Figure 2.

Shannon entropy can be used to quantify transcriptome diversity. (A) A toy example showing the principle of Shannon entropy when describing gene-level diversity. When there is a uniform distribution of gene expression values, the Shannon entropy is higher than when gene expression is concentrated on a smaller number of genes. (B) A toy example of the principle of Shannon entropy when used to describe isoform-level diversity. Even when there are varying numbers of isoforms, the entropy or diversity is at its maximum when the distribution is most uniform or flat.