American International Journal of Social Science

Information Entropy and Urban Population: A Case Study of Taipei City
Tian-Yow Shyu, Tai-Hwa Hor, Hsin-Chien Huang

Abstract
A city can be regarded as a complex system possessing many functions, including business, industry, culture, education, and so on. Citizens in a city may shift houses due to some significant reasons and various activities which have been studied by different organizations. Sometimes the population moves to a certain area (district), and it makes the population distribution more homogenous. How to convert the qualitative description of population change into a quantitative measurement is the aim of this study. Here we apply dada analysis concept to proceed to the urban population system. The total number of population in Taipei City changes every year, and based upon the population data bank, we try to calculate its information entropy. The primary results show that the variation of the information entropy indeed matches with the mechanism of the city's population movement. Moreover, the activities of human society resemble statistically dynamic phenomena in that the macro system is an ensemble of the micro systems.

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