Statistical And Inductive Inference By Minimum Message Length

The Minimum Message Length (MML) Principle is an information-theoretic approach to induction, hypothesis testing, model selection, and statistical inference. MML, which provides a formal specification for the implementation of Occam's Razor, asserts that the ‘best’ explanation of observed data is the shortest. Further, an explanation is acceptable (i.e. the induction is justified) only if the explanation is shorter than the original data. This book gives a sound introduction to the Minimum Message Length Principle and its applications, provides the theoretical arguments for the adoption of the principle, and shows the development of certain approximations that assist its practical application. MML appears also to provide both a normative and a descriptive basis for inductive reasoning generally, and scientific induction in particular. The book describes this basis and aims to show its relevance to the Philosophy of Science. Statistical and Inductive Inference by Minimum Message Length will be of special interest to graduate students and researchers in Machine Learning and Data Mining, scientists and analysts in various disciplines wishing to make use of computer techniques for hypothesis discovery, statisticians and econometricians interested in the underlying theory of their discipline, and persons interested in the Philosophy of Science. The book could also be used in a graduate-level course in Machine Learning and Estimation and Model-selection, Econometrics and Data Mining. C.S. Wallace was appointed Foundation Chair of Computer Science at Monash University in 1968, at the age of 35, where he worked until his death in 2004. He received an ACM Fellowship in 1995, and was appointed Professor Emeritus in 1996. Professor Wallace made numerous significant contributions to diverse areas of Computer Science, such as Computer Architecture, Simulation and Machine Learning. His final research focused primarily on the Minimum Message Length Principle.

This volume contains selected and invited papers presented at the International Conference on Computing and Information, ICCI '90, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, May 23-26, 1990. ICCI conferences provide an international forum for presenting new results in research, development and applications in computing and information. Their primary goal is to promote an interchange of ideas and cooperation between practitioners and theorists in the interdisciplinary fields of computing, communication and information theory. The four main topic areas of ICCI '90 are: - Information and coding theory, statistics and probability, - Foundations of computer science, theory of algorithms and programming, - Concurrency, parallelism, communications, networking, computer architecture and VLSI, - Data and software engineering, databases, expert systems, information systems, decision making, and AI methodologies.

This introduction to the MDL Principle provides a reference accessible to graduate students and researchers in statistics, pattern classification, machine learning, and data mining, to philosophers interested in the foundations of statistics, and to researchers in other applied sciences that involve model selection.

This book explores inductive inference using the minimum message length (MML) principle, a Bayesian method which is a realisation of Ockham's Razor based on information theory. Accompanied by a library of software, the book can assist an applications programmer, student or researcher in the fields of data analysis and machine learning to write computer programs based upon this principle. MML inference has been around for 50 years and yet only one highly technical book has been written about the subject. The majority of research in the field has been backed by specialised one-off programs but this book includes a library of general MML-based software, in Java. The Java source code is available under the GNU GPL open-source license. The software library is documented using Javadoc which produces extensive cross referenced HTML manual pages. Every probability distribution and statistical model that is described in the book is implemented and documented in the software library. The library may contain a component that directly solves a reader's inference problem, or contain components that can be put together to solve the problem, or provide a standard interface under which a new component can be written to solve the problem. This book will be of interest to application developers in the fields of machine learning and statistics as well as academics, postdocs, programmers and data scientists. It could also be used by third year or fourth year undergraduate or postgraduate students.

Algorithmic probability and friends: Proceedings of the Ray Solomonoff 85th memorial conference is a collection of original work and surveys. The Solomonoff 85th memorial conference was held at Monash University's Clayton campus in Melbourne, Australia as a tribute to pioneer, Ray Solomonoff (1926-2009), honouring his various pioneering works - most particularly, his revolutionary insight in the early 1960s that the universality of Universal Turing Machines (UTMs) could be used for universal Bayesian prediction and artificial intelligence (machine learning). This work continues to increasingly influence and under-pin statistics, econometrics, machine learning, data mining, inductive inference, search algorithms, data compression, theories of (general) intelligence and philosophy of science - and applications of these areas. Ray not only envisioned this as the path to genuine artificial intelligence, but also, still in the 1960s, anticipated stages of progress in machine intelligence which would ultimately lead to machines surpassing human intelligence. Ray warned of the need to anticipate and discuss the potential consequences - and dangers - sooner rather than later. Possibly foremostly, Ray Solomonoff was a fine, happy, frugal and adventurous human being of gentle resolve who managed to fund himself while electing to conduct so much of his paradigm-changing research outside of the university system. The volume contains 35 papers pertaining to the abovementioned topics in tribute to Ray Solomonoff and his legacy.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AI 2005, held in Sydney, Australia in December 2005. The 77 revised full papers and 119 revised short papers presented together with the abstracts of 3 keynote speeches were carefully reviewed and selected from 535 submissions. The papers are catgorized in three broad sections, namely: AI foundations and technologies, computational intelligence, and AI in specialized domains. Particular topics addressed by the papers are logic and reasoning, machine learning, game theory, robotic technology, data mining, neural networks, fuzzy theory and algorithms, evolutionary computing, Web intelligence, decision making, pattern recognition, agent technology, and AI applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 23rd Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AI 2010, held in Adelaide, Australia, in December 2010. The 52 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 112 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge representation and reasoning; data mining and knowledge discovery; machine learning; statistical learning; evolutionary computation; particle swarm optimization; intelligent agent; search and planning; natural language processing; and AI applications.