Related papers: Applying MDL to Learning Best Model Granularity
The Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle offers a formal framework for applying Occam's razor in machine learning. However, its application to neural networks such as Transformers is challenging due to the lack of a principled,…
In the signal processing and statistics literature, the minimum description length (MDL) principle is a popular tool for choosing model complexity. Successful examples include signal denoising and variable selection in linear regression,…
State-of-the-art neural networks can be trained to become remarkable solutions to many problems. But while these architectures can express symbolic, perfect solutions, trained models often arrive at approximations instead. We show that the…
This is about the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle applied to pattern mining. The length of this description is kept to the minimum. Mining patterns is a core task in data analysis and, beyond issues of efficient enumeration, the…
The Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle selects the model that has the shortest code for data plus model. We show that for a countable class of models, MDL predictions are close to the true distribution in a strong sense. The result…
Robust low-rank matrix estimation is a topic of increasing interest, with promising applications in a variety of fields, from computer vision to data mining and recommender systems. Recent theoretical results establish the ability of such…
We analyze differences between two information-theoretically motivated approaches to statistical inference and model selection: the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle, and the Minimum Message Length (MML) principle. Based on this…
Minimum Description Length (MDL) provides a framework and an objective for principled model evaluation. It formalizes Occam's Razor and can be applied to data from non-stationary sources. In the prequential formulation of MDL, the objective…
This paper introduces a new method for model selection and more generally hyperparameter selection in machine learning. Minimum description length (MDL) is an established method for model selection, which is however not directly aimed at…
The relationship between the Bayesian approach and the minimum description length approach is established. We sharpen and clarify the general modeling principles MDL and MML, abstracted as the ideal MDL principle and defined from Bayes's…
Model selection is central to statistics, and many learning problems can be formulated as model selection problems. In this paper, we treat the problem of selecting a maximum entropy model given various feature subsets and their moments, as…
Modern statistical modeling is an important complement to the more traditional approach of physics where Complex Systems are studied by means of extremely simple idealized models. The Minimum Description Length (MDL) is a principled…
Minimum Description Length (MDL) is an important principle for induction and prediction, with strong relations to optimal Bayesian learning. This paper deals with learning non-i.i.d. processes by means of two-part MDL, where the underlying…
In the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle, learning from the data is equivalent to an optimal coding problem. We show that the codes that achieve optimal compression in MDL are critical in a very precise sense. First, when they are…
The concept of overfitting in model selection is explained and demonstrated with an example. After providing some background information on information theory and Kolmogorov complexity, we provide a short explanation of Minimum Description…
This paper introduces a new notion of dimensionality of probabilistic models from an information-theoretic view point. We call it the "descriptive dimension"(Ddim). We show that Ddim coincides with the number of independent parameters for…
This is an up-to-date introduction to and overview of the Minimum Description Length (MDL) Principle, a theory of inductive inference that can be applied to general problems in statistics, machine learning and pattern recognition. While MDL…
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…
This paper introduces a novel optimization framework that fundamentally integrates the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle into the training dynamics of deep neural networks. Moving beyond its conventional role as a model selection…
In previous work we developed a method of learning Bayesian Network models from raw data. This method relies on the well known minimal description length (MDL) principle. The MDL principle is particularly well suited to this task as it…