Related papers: Inverse Occam's razor
It appears paradoxical that science is producing outstanding new results and theories at a rapid rate at the same time that researchers are identifying serious problems in the practice of science that cause many reports to be irreproducible…
With the increasing deployment of machine learning systems in practice, transparency and explainability have become serious issues. Contrastive explanations are considered to be useful and intuitive, in particular when it comes to…
Regularization methods are a key tool in the solution of inverse problems. They are used to introduce prior knowledge and make the approximation of ill-posed (pseudo-)inverses feasible. In the last two decades interest has shifted from…
Regular variation of distributional tails is known to be preserved by various linear transformations of some random structures. An inverse problem for regular variation aims at understanding whether the regular variation of a transformed…
Indirect evidence is crucial for successful statistical practice. Sometimes, however, it is better used informally. Future efforts should be directed toward understanding better the connection between statistical methods and scientific…
As artificial intelligence and machine learning tools become more accessible, and scientists face new obstacles to data collection (e.g. rising costs, declining survey response rates), researchers increasingly use predictions from…
In analogy to compressed sensing, which allows sample-efficient signal reconstruction given prior knowledge of its sparsity in frequency domain, we propose to utilize policy simplicity (Occam's Razor) as a prior to enable sample-efficient…
This article offers a short guide to the steps scientists can take to ensure that their data and associated analyses continue to be of value and to be recognized. In just the past few years, hundreds of scholarly papers and reports have…
The origin and meaning of facial beauty represent a longstanding puzzle. Despite the profuse literature devoted to facial attractiveness, its very nature, its determinants and the nature of inter-person differences remain controversial…
We often desire our models to be interpretable as well as accurate. Prior work on optimizing models for interpretability has relied on easy-to-quantify proxies for interpretability, such as sparsity or the number of operations required. In…
Space Science enjoys broad public support in the US. People say they follow developments with interest, and that the programs are worth their cost. This attitude seems to arise in part because of the intrinsic accessibility and appeal of…
In the last few decades both the volume of high-quality observing data on variable stars and common access to them have boomed; however the standard used methods of data processing and interpretation have lagged behind this progress. The…
"Mathematicians, like physicists, are pushed by a strong fascination. Research in mathematics is hard, it is intellectually painful even if it is rewarding, and you would not do it without some strong urge." [D. Ruelle]. We shall give some…
Automated decision-making systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, which creates an immediate need for their interpretability and explainability. However, it remains unclear whether users know what insights an explanation offers and,…
Prediction is the making of statements, usually probabilistic, about future events based on current information. Retrodiction is the making of statements about past events based on current information. We present the foundations of quantum…
Combining principles with pragmatism, a new approach and accompanying algorithm are presented to a longstanding problem in applied statistics: the interpretation of principal components. Following Rousson and Gasser [53 (2004) 539--555]…
Increasingly encompassing models have been suggested for our world. Theories range from generally accepted to increasingly speculative to apparently bogus. The progression of theories from ego- to geo- to helio-centric models to universe…
For obtaining causal inferences that are objective, and therefore have the best chance of revealing scientific truths, carefully designed and executed randomized experiments are generally considered to be the gold standard. Observational…
The generally accepted wisdom in computational circles is that pure proof verification is a solved problem and that the computationally hard elements and fertile areas of study lie in proof discovery. This wisdom presumably does hold for…
It may happen that for a certain abductive problem there are several possible explanations, not all of them mutually compatible. What explanation is selected and which criteria are used to select it? This is the well-known problem of the…