  High-throughput optical communication systems utilize binary soft-decision
forward error correction (SD-FEC) with bit interleaving over the bit channels.
The generalized mutual information (GMI) is an achievable information rate
(AIR) in such systems and is known to be a good predictor of the bit error rate
after SD-FEC decoding (post-FEC BER) for uniform signaling. However, for
probabilistically shaped (nonuniform) signaling, we find that the normalized
AIR, defined as the AIR divided by the signal entropy, is less correlated with
the post-FEC BER. We show that the information quantity based on the
distribution of the single bit signal, and its asymmetric loglikelihood ratio,
are better predictors of the post-FEC BER. In simulations over the Gaussian
channel, we find that the prediction accuracy, quantified as the peak-to-peak
deviation of the post-FEC BER within a set of different modulation formats and
distributions, can be improved more than 10 times compared with the normalized
AIR.
