Comment by walterbell

Relative numbers (e.g. 1% above or below an average) can ferry signals to both humans and data mining algorithms.

https://plus.maths.org/content/information-surprise

> Shannon wanted to measure the amount of information you could transmit via various media. There are many ways of sending messages: you could produce smoke signals, use Morse code, the telephone, or (in today's world) send an email. To treat them all on equal terms, Shannon decided to forget about exactly how each of these methods transmits a message and simply thought of them as ways of producing strings of symbols. How do you measure the information contained in such a string?