Related papers: Grounding Occam's Razor in a Formal Theory of Simp…
This work describes the principled design of a theoretical framework leading to fast and accurate algorithmic information measures on finite multisets of finite strings by means of compression. One distinctive feature of our approach is to…
Occam's Razor tells us to pick the simplest model that fits our observations. In order to make sense of his process mathematically, we interpret it in the context of posets of functions. Our approach leads to some unusual new combinatorial…
Statistical learning theory is often associated with the principle of Occam's razor, which recommends a simplicity preference in inductive inference. This paper distills the core argument for simplicity obtainable from statistical learning…
Matrix completion and approximation are popular tools to capture a user's preferences for recommendation and to approximate missing data. Instead of using low-rank factorization we take a drastically different approach, based on the simple…
We introduce algorithmic information theory, also known as the theory of Kolmogorov complexity. We explain the main concepts of this quantitative approach to defining `information'. We discuss the extent to which Kolmogorov's and Shannon's…
Solomonoff's general theory of inference and the Minimum Description Length principle formalize Occam's razor, and hold that a good model of data is a model that is good at losslessly compressing the data, including the cost of describing…
The task of parametric model selection is cast in terms of a statistical mechanics on the space of probability distributions. Using the techniques of low-temperature expansions, we arrive at a systematic series for the Bayesian posterior…
An earlier introduced characterization of nonuniform learnability that allows the sample size to depend on the hypothesis to which the learner is compared has been redefined using the measure theoretic approach. Where nonuniform…
Solomonoff unified Occam's razor and Epicurus' principle of multiple explanations to one elegant, formal, universal theory of inductive inference, which initiated the field of algorithmic information theory. His central result is that the…
Ensemble theories have received a lot of interest recently as a means of explaining a lot of the detailed complexity observed in reality by a vastly simpler description ``every possibility exists'' and a selection principle ({\em Anthropic…
Input-output maps are prevalent throughout science and technology. They are empirically observed to be biased towards simple outputs, but we don't understand why. To address this puzzle, we study the archetypal input-output map: a…
Solomonoff unified Occam's razor and Epicurus' principle of multiple explanations to one elegant, formal, universal theory of inductive inference, which initiated the field of algorithmic information theory. His central result is that the…
This article applies the principle of Occam's Razor to non-parametric model building of statistical data, by finding a model with the minimal number of bits, leading to an exceptionally effective regularization method for probability…
We study the problem of inferring the structure of a communication network based only on network measurements made from a set of hosts situated at the network periphery. Our novel approach called "OCCAM" is based on the principle of occam's…
All fields of science depend on mathematical models. Occam's razor refers to the principle that good models should exclude parameters beyond those minimally required to describe the systems they represent. This is because redundancy can…
Quantum computers and simulators offer unparalleled capabilities of probing quantum many-body states, by obtaining snapshots of the many-body wave function via collective projective measurements. The probability distribution obtained by…
Theories can be represented as statistical models for empirical testing. There is a vast literature on model selection and multimodel inference that focuses on how to assess which statistical model, and therefore which theory, best fits the…
This work derives closed-form expressions computing the expectation of co-presence and of number of co-occurrences of nodes on paths sampled from a network according to general path weights (a bag of paths). The underlying idea is that two…
Interpretation of cosmological data to determine the number and values of parameters describing the universe must not rely solely on statistics but involve physical insight. When statistical techniques such as "model selection" or…
We develop an encompassing framework for matching, covariate balancing, and doubly-robust methods for causal inference from observational data called generalized optimal matching (GOM). The framework is given by generalizing a new…