Entropy and predictability of information carriers

The structure of linear strings carrying information is investigated by means of entropy concepts. First conditional entropy and transinformation are introduced and several generalizations are discussed. The capability to describe the structure of information carriers as DNA, proteins, texts and musical strings is investigated. The relation between order and the predictability of informational strings is discussed. As examples we study the mutual information function of virus DNA and several long proteins. Further we show some (rather formal) analogies to the structure of texts, and strings generated by musical melodies. It is shown that several information carriers show long-range correlations.