Tsallis entropy and q-analogue of information

The connection between Tsallis entropy and multifractals is deeply related to the q-deformation formalism. This fact is used to define the q-analogues of bits of information and bit numbers in the context of generalized Tsallis statistics. Two alternate definitions of generalized information gain are proposed. We also point out that standard base-2 information theory can be considered as inherently q-deformed with q = 2. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V.