Explanatory and Creative Alternatives to the MDL priciple

Foundations of Science 5 (2):185-207 (2000)
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Abstract

The Minimum Description Length principle is the modernformalisation of Occam's razor. It has been extensively and successfullyused in machine learning, especially for noisy and long sources ofdata. However, the MDL principle presents some paradoxes andinconveniences. After discussing all these, we address two of the mostrelevant: lack of explanation and lack of creativity. We present newalternatives to address these problems. The first one, intensionalcomplexity, avoids extensional parts in a description, so distributingcompression ratio in a more even way than the MDL principle. The secondone, information gain, forces that the hypothesis is informative wrt. the evidence, so giving a formaldefinition of what is to discover.

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Citations of this work

Beyond the Turing test.Jose Hernandez-Orallo - 2000 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 9 (4):447-466.

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References found in this work

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Thomas S. Kuhn - 1962 - Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Ian Hacking.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Thomas Samuel Kuhn - 1962 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Otto Neurath.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.David Bohm - 1964 - Philosophical Quarterly 14 (57):377-379.

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