Minimum description length MDL
<p>Jul 02, 2011 08:29 PM
 
MDL = minimum description length
 
formalizes Occam's Razor
 
best hypothesis leads to the best compression of the data.
 
MDL introduced by Jorma Rissanen in 1978.
 
MDL  take any string... if there are any regularities, compress them out.
 
Kolmogorov complexity = length of shortest program that outputs the data.
 
This is the central idea of Ray Solomonoff's idealized theory of inductive inference.
 
 
 
 </p>