Related papers: Inverse Occam's razor
This paper's first aim is to prove a modernized Occam's razor beyond a reasonable doubt. To summarize the main argument in one sentence: If we consider all possible, intelligible, scientific models of ever-higher complexity, democratically,…
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…
Mathematical models are an essential component of quantitative science. They generate predictions about the future, based on information available in the present. In the spirit of Occam's razor, simpler is better; should two models make…
This paper presents new experimental evidence against the utility of Occam's razor. A~systematic procedure is presented for post-processing decision trees produced by C4.5. This procedure was derived by rejecting Occam's razor and instead…
Both religion and science start with basic assumptions that cannot be proved but are taken on faith. Here I note that one basic assumption that is rather common in both enterprises is the assumption that in comparing different hypotheses…
We provide a new representation-independent formulation of Occam's razor theorem, based on Kolmogorov complexity. This new formulation allows us to: (i) Obtain better sample complexity than both length-based and VC-based versions of Occam's…
Ockham's razor is a heuristic concept applied in philosophy of science to decide between two or more feasible physical theories. Ockham's razor operates by deciding in favour of the theory with least assumptions and concepts; roughly…
An attempt to redefine science in the 21st century (BK Jennings, On the Nature of Science, Physics in Canada, 63(7) 2007) has abandoned traditional notions of natural law and objective reality, blurred the distinctions between natural…
Inverse problems, where in broad sense the task is to learn from the noisy response about some unknown function, usually represented as the argument of some known functional form, has received wide attention in the general scientific…
The debate between scientific realism and anti-realism remains at a stalemate, making reconciliation seem hopeless. Yet, important work remains: exploring a common ground, even if only to uncover deeper points of disagreement and, ideally,…
A system's apparent simplicity depends on whether it is represented classically or quantally. This is not so surprising, as classical and quantum physics are descriptive frameworks built on different assumptions that capture, emphasize, and…
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…
Lately there has been a lot of discussion about why deep learning algorithms perform better than we would theoretically suspect. To get insight into this question, it helps to improve our understanding of how learning works. We explore the…
Some attack scientific rationality, others defend it, but both miss the point. What both parties take to be scientific rationality is actually a species of irrationality masquerading as scientific rationality. The current orthodox…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) attempts to infer human rewards or preferences from observed behavior. Since human planning systematically deviates from rationality, several approaches have been tried to account for specific human…
Research in cognitive psychology has established that whether people prefer simpler explanations to complex ones is context dependent, but the question of `simple vs. complex' becomes critical when an artificial agent seeks to explain its…
The science of complexity is far from being fully understood and even its foundations are not well established. On the other hand, during the last decade, the random motion of particles or waves - the so-called diffusion - has been known…
This is a philosophy-intense physics article, or, if you wish, a physics-intense philosophy article. Also, being a mathematician, I tend to view the physics, in particular the essence of quantum physics, in emphasizing the mathematical…
As new classes of transients and variable stars are discovered, and theoretical models are established to work or not to work for a few members of the class, it is often the case that some researchers will make arguments on the basis of…
A 21st century view of the nature of science is presented. It attempts to show how a consistent description of science and scientific progress can be given. Science advances through a sequence of models with progressively greater predictive…