Related papers: Why Occam's Razor
Entangled Relativity is a novel theory of relativity that offers a more economical approach than General Relativity. It successfully recovers both General Relativity and standard quantum field theory within a specific (yet generic) limit.…
Robotic systems for household object rearrangement often rely on latent preference models inferred from human demonstrations. While effective at prediction, these models offer limited insight into the interpretable factors that guide human…
Experimental evidene of the last decades has made the status of "collapses of the wave function" even more shaky than it already was on conceptual grounds: interference effects turn out to be detectable even when collapses are typically…
One aspect of the algorithmic lens in theoretical computer science is a view on other scientific disciplines that focuses on satisfactory solutions that adhere to real-world constraints, as opposed to solutions that would be optimal…
We will argue that a phenomenological analysis of consciousness, similar to that of Husserl, shows that the effects of phenomenal qualities shape our perception of the world. It also shows the way the physical and mathematical sciences…
In this note we introduce linear regression with basis functions in order to apply Bayesian model selection. The goal is to incorporate Occam's razor as provided by Bayes analysis in order to automatically pick the model optimally able to…
The problem of interpreting quantum theory on a large (e.g. cosmological) scale has been commonly conceived as a search for objective reality in a framework that is fundamentally probabilistic. The Everett programme attempts to evade the…
One of the objectives of designing feature selection learning algorithms is to obtain classifiers that depend on a small number of attributes and have verifiable future performance guarantees. There are few, if any, approaches that…
Quantum theory is applicable, in principle, to both the microscopic and macroscopic realms. It is therefore worthwhile to investigate whether it is possible to evolve a quantum-compatible view of the properties and states of macroscopic…
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…
Neural networks' expressiveness comes at the cost of complex, black-box models that often extrapolate poorly beyond the domain of the training dataset, conflicting with the goal of finding compact analytic expressions to describe scientific…
The program of a physical concept of information is outlined in the framework of quantum theory. A proposal is made for how to avoid the introduction of axiomatic observables. The conventional (collapse) and the Everett interpretations of…
Decision-making in complex systems often relies on machine learning models, yet highly accurate models such as XGBoost and neural networks can obscure the reasoning behind their predictions. In operations research applications,…
We provide the first social choice theory approach to the question of what constitutes a community in a social network. Inspired by the classic preferences models in social choice theory, we start from an abstract social network framework,…
Background: Understanding the relationship between the Omics and the phenotype is a central problem in precision medicine. The high dimensionality of metabolomics data challenges learning algorithms in terms of scalability and…
Scientists have long preferred the simplest possible explanation of their data. More re-cently, a worrying trend to favor complex interpretations has taken hold because they are perceived as more impactful.
Core quantum postulates including the superposition principle and the unitarity of evolutions are natural and strikingly simple. I show that -- when supplemented with a limited version of predictability (captured in the textbook accounts by…
Assembly theory (AT) quantifies selection using the assembly equation and identifies complex objects that occur in abundance based on two measurements, assembly index and copy number, where the assembly index is the minimum number of…
From a general abstract system theoretical perspective, a quantum-like system description in the spirit of a generalized Quantum Theory may appear to be simpler and more natural than a classically inspired description. We investigate the…
Quantum theory describes our universe incredibly successfully. To our classically-inclined brains, however, it is a bizarre description that requires a re-imagining of what fundamental reality, or "ontology", could look like. This thesis…