Parsimony means extreme frugality, or stinginess, and in this context it refers to being stingy with assumptions (by trying to avoid them). The law of parsimony is a principle that says that the best explanation is the one that requires you to make the fewest possible assumptions about whats involved. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. [13][14] Aristotle writes in his Posterior Analytics, "We may assume the superiority ceteris paribus [other things being equal] of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses." Often equated with Occam's Razor, the law is not . Occam's Razor Explained | Mike Gastin pic.twitter.com/fgaSyjY2Wf, YIMBY! Brian Duignan is a senior editor at Encyclopdia Britannica. For a specific example of MML as Occam's razor in the problem of decision tree induction, see Dowe and Needham's "Message Length as an Effective Ockham's Razor in Decision Tree Induction".[79]. The law of parsimony suggests identifying the simplest, least complicated explanation of a situation or observation. This, again, reflects the mathematical relationship between key concepts in Bayesian inference (namely marginal probability, conditional probability, and posterior probability). Occams razor is credited to William of Ockham, a Franciscan theologian and philosopher who lived during the late 13th to mid-14th century, though he was not the first to propose it. However, unlike many theologians of his time, Ockham did not believe God could be logically proven with arguments. It doesnt prove or disprove, it simply leads you down the path thats most likely to be correct. An Intuitive Explanation of Solomonoff Induction, LessWrong, An Intuitive Explanation of Solomonoff Induction. In software development, the rule of least power argues the correct programming language to use is the one that is simplest while also solving the targeted software problem. Ptolemy (c.AD 90 c.168) stated, "We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible. Postulating extra entities may allow a theory to be formulated more simply, while reducing the ontology of a theory may only be possible at the price of making it syntactically more complex. "[73] Interpreting this as minimising the total length of a two-part message encoding model followed by data given model gives us the minimum message length (MML) principle. What is 'Parsimony' and How Can It Transform Our | Arnold Ventures Induction: From Kolmogorov and Solomonoff to De Finetti and Back to Kolmogorov JJ McCall Metroeconomica, 2004 Wiley Online Library. In response he devised his own anti-razor: "If three things are not enough to verify an affirmative proposition about things, a fourth must be added and so on." [6][49], In chemistry, Occam's razor is often an important heuristic when developing a model of a reaction mechanism.

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