The information bottleneck method
Source: Dev.to
Overview
Imagine a photo or a voice, and you only want the parts that tell you who is in the photo or what word was said.
This idea picks out the information that really matters by squeezing a big signal down through a small hole — the bottleneck.
The trick is to make a tiny code that still tells you about the other thing you care about, while tossing the rest away.
It finds the few features that do the predicting, so you don’t need to keep everything.
It’s like packing for a trip: bring the clothes that help you, leave what’s useless, but still know who you are going to meet.
The method learns which bits to save and which to drop, iterating until the short code works well.
For people building smarter apps or studying brains, this gives a clear way to keep the meaning and lose the noise, and you get compact, useful signals without extra bulk.