David Dowe's Occam's razor links

William of Occam (circa. 1280 or 1285 till circa. 1347 or 1349, apparently 10th April 1349) is also known as William of Ockham. We attribute to William the scientific principle known nowadays as "Occam's razor". Below are various links about William, quotations attributed to him and modern-day interpretations and analyses of his "Ockham's razor" principle.

[See also Ray Solomonoff (1926-2009) 85th memorial conference (Wedn 30 Nov - Fri 2 Dec 2011), 1st Call for Papers.]

A
Akaike Information Criterion (AIC): For a comparison between Minimum Message Length (MML) and AIC, see, e.g., here.
Lloyd Allison's William of Ockham page.
B
Vijay Balasubramanian and V. Balasubramanian, "Statistical Inference, Occam's Razor and Statistical Mechanics on The Space of Probability Distributions", Tech Rept PUPT-1587, Dept of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA, 15 July 2002; and V. Balasubramanian, "A Geometric Formulation of Occam's Razor For Inference Of Parametric Distributions", Tech Rept PUPT-1588, Dept of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA, 5 August 2002.
Rohan Baxter's Occam Quotes.
Rev. Thomas Bayes (deceased, 1761), a small drawing of Rev. Thomas Bayes, and a link re Bayesian Statisticians worldwide.
Dave Beckett's William of Occam Biography.
Jim Berger's Select Recent Papers: Ockham's razor and Bayesian analysis, Final version appeared as: Jefferys, W. and Berger, J. (1992) `American Scientist', { 80}, 64--72.
The British Academy's publications and William of Ockham: Dialogus (also here); edited by John Kilcullen, George Knysh, Volker Leppin, John Scott and Jan Ballweg.
Jean Buridan (ca. 1295 - ca. 1358) was a student of William of Ockham.
C
Sally-Jo Cunningham.
D
Pedro Domingos and "The Role of Occam's Razor in Knowledge Discovery", 1999.
David Dowe: is joint author of Wallace, C.S. and D.L. Dowe, "Minimum Message Length and Kolmogorov complexity", Comp. J., Vol 42, No. 4 (1999a), pp270-283 [this article gives a survey and detailed theory re MML, and is also the Computer Journal's most downloaded ``full text as .pdf'' - see, e.g., here]; and S.L. Needham and D.L. Dowe, "Message Length as an Effective Ockham's Razor in Decision Tree Induction", Proc. 8th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (2001), pp253-260 discusses MML and Ockham's razor and refines earlier work by showing that Ockham's razor works fine when interpreted quantitatively as the MML trade-off between model simplicity and goodness of fit.
E
Albert Einstein is often attributed the quotation: ``Theories should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.''.
Jacob Eliosoff's and Ernesto Posse's Interpretations and philosophical foundations of Occam's Razor.
English spelling and Taking Ockham's Razor to English spelling: "It's the spelling that's stupid - not me", on Ockham's Razor programme, Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), Radio National, Sunday 5/05/2002.
F
Graham Farr.
Len Fisher (Physics, Bristol), and interview: "The Ockham's Razor Principle", on Ockham's Razor programme, Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), Radio National, Sunday 2/10/2005.
Malcolm Forster: University of Wisconsin - Madison Philosophy's Simplicity, Unification, Parsimony, and Occam's Razor in Science.
Furman University's Mathematical Quotation Server: William of Occam (1300-1439) quotation.
G
Steve Gardner.
Anthony Garrett (and here) and interview: "The meaning of Ockham's Razor", on Ockham's Razor programme, Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), Radio National, Sunday 16/04/2000.
H
William R. Hamilton, 1900s.
Francis Heylighen's Occam's Razor, in Principia Cybernetica Web.
I
Inductive inference, compression, MML, Kolmogorov complexity, Ockham's razor and intelligence: Dowe and Hajek (1998).
Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy's Ockham, William of (d. 1347, or apparently 10th April 1349).
J
Murray Jorgensen.
K
Kolmogorov complexity and (its tractable decidable form) Minimum Message Length (MML) as operational forms of Occam's razor in practical data analysis.
L
Bill Latura's What is Occam's Razor? and The Scientific Method, from sci.skeptic FAQ Scientific Method.
M
Minimum Description Length (MDL) as an operational form of Occam's razor in practical data analysis - see also MML.
Minimum Message Length (MML) as an operational form of Occam's razor in practical data analysis - see also MDL.
"Minimum Message Length, MDL and Generalised Bayesian Networks with Asymmetric Languages", by J. W. Comley and D.L. Dowe (2005); Chapter 11 (pp265-294) in P. Grunwald, M. A. Pitt and I. J. Myung (eds.), Advances in Minimum Description Length: Theory and Applications, M.I.T. Press, April 2005, ISBN 0-262-07262-9. {This is about Generalised Bayesian nets, generalising MML Bayesian nets or MML Bayesian networks or MML Bayes nets (or Generalised directed graphical models, generalising MML directed graphical models); and it deals with a mix of both continuous and discrete variables. (See also Comley and Dowe (2003), .pdf.)} Also, pp272-273 of Comley and Dowe (2005) discusses MML working fine as Ockham's razor provided the coding scheme is reliable and efficient.
MML as an effective Ockham's razor: Needham and Dowe (2001).
P. Murphy: see Murphy, P. and Pazzani, M., 1994.
N
B. Natarajan's On learning functions from noise-free and noisy samples via Occam's razor, S.I.A.M. J. Computing, Vol. 29, No. 3, pp712-727, 1999.
Scott Needham - with David Dowe - discusses MML and Ockham's razor in Needham and Dowe, "Message Length as an Effective Ockham's Razor in Decision Tree Induction", Proc. 8th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (2001), pp253-260.
Isaac Newton (1642-1727). From Newton's 'Principia', a related quotation: "... we are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances".
O
"Ockham's Razor" programme (and blurb), with Robyn Williams, Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) Radio National.
Ockham's razor done effectively by MML: Needham and Dowe (2001).
http://OccamsSword.com: includes bibliographies related to Occam's Razor, simplicity in the Philosophy of Science and parsimony in Biology and the Philosophy of Biology as well as a subject guide for Occam's Razor.
Graham Oppy.
P
Michael Pazzani's Murphy, P., & Pazzani, M. (1994). Exploring the decision forest: An empirical investigation of OCCAM's razor in decision tree induction, Journal of Artificial Intelligence, 1, 257-275. [See also the Needham and Dowe (2001), "Message Length as an Effective Ockham's Razor in Decision Tree Induction" response (pp253-260) to this.]
Marcus Pivato, On Occam's Razor (2000).
John Ponce, circa 1600s.
Ernesto Posse: Jacob Eliosoff's and Ernesto Posse's Interpretations of Occam's Razor.
Richard Price, editor of Rev. Thomas Bayes's posthumous 1763 paper.
Principia Cybernetica Web's Occam's Razor by Francis Heylighen.
Ptolemy, from 2nd century (A.D.) Alexandria.
R
Rasmussen, C. E. (was here) and Ghahramani, Z. (2000). Occam's Razor (abstract ps pdf). Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 13, eds. T. Leen, T. Dietterich, V. Tresp, MIT Press (2001).
S
The Skeptic's Dictionary's Occam's Razor.
Elliot Sober: University of Wisconsin - Madison Philosophy's Simplicity, Unification, Parsimony, and Occam's Razor in Science.
T
W. M. Thorburn.
The "Turing test", Ockham's razor and MML.
U
Usenet Physics FAQ What is Occam's Razor? (and here).
Twardy, Charles R., Steve Gardner and D.L. Dowe (2005). Empirical Data Sets are Algorithmically Compressible: Reply to McAllister. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 36, pp 391-402, 2005. \url{http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2005.04.004} % \url{http://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S003936810500021X} http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=GatewayURL&_origin=CONTENTS&_method=citationSearch&_piikey=S003936810500021X&_version=1&md5=37843262f886249c7789ae186785768d
W
Chris Wallace (1933-2004), developer (in 1968) of Minimum Message Length (MML).
Wallace, C.S. (2005) [posthumous], Statistical and Inductive Inference by Minimum Message Length, Springer (Series: Information Science and Statistics), 2005, XVI, 432 pp., 22 illus., Hardcover, ISBN: 0-387-23795-X [table of contents, chapter headings and more]
Wallace, C.S. (with D.L. Dowe), "Minimum Message Length and Kolmogorov complexity" (with D. L. Dowe), Comp. J., Vol 42, No. 4 (1999a), pp270-283 [this article is the Computer Journal's most downloaded ``full text as .pdf'' - see, e.g., here].
Geoff I. Webb, Further Experimental evidence against the utility of Occam's Razor. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 4. 1996.
Eric Weisstein's Treasure Trove of Physics (frames version): Search entire site on Ockham, giving: Ockham, William of, Ockham's Razor and W. of O.'s student, Buridan, Jean.
Robyn Williams and "Ockham's Razor" programme (and blurb), Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), Radio National.
University of Wisconsin - Madison Philosophy's Simplicity, Unification, Parsimony, and Occam's Razor in Science.
Jose Wudka (and here)'s "What is Ockham's Razor?".

Minimum Message Length (MML) as an operational form of Occam's razor in practical data analysis.

Miscellaneous, other, links
Bayesian networks using MML,
clustering and mixture modelling,
comparisons between MML and the subsequent Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle,
data repositories,
decision tree s and decision graph s using MML,
Snob (program for MML clustering and mixture modelling),
(econometric) time series using MML,
medical research,
a probabilistic sports prediction competition (and further reading on probabilistic scoring),
chess and game theory research;
TheHungerSite, TheRainforestSite, "do-goody"/"do-goody stuff, improving the world and saving the planet".

Please e-mail me if you would like to know more.

This Ockham's razor WWW page, http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~dld/Occam.html , was last updated no earlier than 19th Apr. 2000.

Copyright David L. Dowe, Monash University, Australia, 23 March 2000.