Total correlation quantifies the amount of dependence among a group of variables. A near-zero total correlation indicates that the variables in the group are essentially statistically independent; they are completely unrelated, in the sense that knowing the value of one variable does not provide any clue as to the values of the other variables. On the other hand, the maximum total correlation (for a fixed set of individual entropies H(X_1), ..., H(X_n)) is given by
