Related papers: The Combinatorics of Falsification and Hypothesis …
This paper is concerned with the question of when a theory is refutable with certainty on the basis of sequence of primitive observations. Beginning with the simple definition of falsifiability as the ability to be refuted by some finite…
Null Hypothesis Statistical Testing is a dominant framework for conducting statistical analysis across the sciences. There remains considerable debate as to whether, and under what circumstances, evidence can be said to be confirmatory of a…
We information-theoretically reformulate two measures of capacity from statistical learning theory: empirical VC-entropy and empirical Rademacher complexity. We show these capacity measures count the number of hypotheses about a dataset…
Model theory, machine learning, and combinatorics each have generalizations of VC-dimension for fuzzy and real-valued versions of set systems. These different dimensions define a unique notion of a VC-class for both fuzzy sets and…
Topological models of empirical and formal inquiry are increasingly prevalent. They have emerged in such diverse fields as domain theory [1, 16], formal learning theory [18], epistemology and philosophy of science [10, 15, 8, 9, 2],…
Motivated by the problem of finding finite versions of classical incompleteness theorems, we present some conjectures that go beyond ${\bf NP\neq co NP}$. These conjectures formally connect computational complexity with the difficulty of…
As consequence of the VC theorem, any pseudo-finite measure over an NIP ultraproduct is generically stable. We demonstrate a converse of this theorem and prove that any finitely approximable measure over an ultraproduct is itself…
A hypothesis testing algorithm is replicable if, when run on two different samples from the same distribution, it produces the same output with high probability. This notion, defined by by Impagliazzo, Lei, Pitassi, and Sorell [STOC'22],…
A meta-complexity assumption, Feasible Chaitin Incompleteness (FCI), asserts the hardness of ruling out length $t$ proofs that string $x$ is Kolmogorov random (e.g. $x{\in}R$), by analogy to Chaitin's result that proving $x{\in}R$ is…
Finite Unified Theories (FUTs) are N=1 supersymmetric Grand Unified Theories that can be made all-loop finite, leading to a severe reduction of the free parameters. We review the investigation of FUTs based on SU(5) in the context of…
In the problem of composite hypothesis testing, identifying the potential uniformly most powerful (UMP) unbiased test is of great interest. Beyond typical hypothesis settings with exponential family, it is usually challenging to prove the…
We show that any pseudofinite group with NIP theory and with a finite upper bound on the length of chains of centralisers is soluble-by-finite. In particular, any NIP rosy pseudofinite group is soluble-by-finite. This generalises, and…
Classical nucleation theory (CNT) is built upon the capillarity approximation, i.e., the assumption that the nucleation properties can be inferred from the bulk properties of the melt and the crystal. Although CNT's simplicity and…
In this paper, we take a fresh look at three Popperian concepts: riskiness, falsifiability, and truthlikeness (or verisimilitude) of scientific hypotheses or theories. First, we make explicit the dimensions that underlie the notion of…
A formula $\phi$ is called \emph{$n$-provable} in a formal arithmetical theory $S$ if $\phi$ is provable in $S$ together with all true arithmetical $\Pi_{n}$-sentences taken as additional axioms. While in general the set of all $n$-provable…
We systematically investigate the complexity of model checking the existential positive fragment of first-order logic. In particular, for a set of existential positive sentences, we consider model checking where the sentence is restricted…
In the modern Bayesian view classical probability theory is simply an extension of conventional logic, i.e., a quantitative tool that allows for consistent reasoning in the presence of uncertainty. Classical theory presupposes, however,…
In this paper we prove Chaitin's ``heuristic principle'', {\it the theorems of a finitely-specified theory cannot be significantly more complex than the theory itself}, for an appropriate measure of complexity. We show that the measure is…
Maximum satisfiability is a canonical NP-hard optimization problem that appears empirically hard for random instances. Let us say that a Conjunctive normal form (CNF) formula consisting of $k$-clauses is $p$-satisfiable if there exists a…
A long noted difficulty when assessing the reliability (or calibration) of forecasting systems is that reliability, in general, is a hypothesis not about a finite dimensional parameter but about an entire functional relationship. A…