Further Experimental Evidence against the Utility of Occam's Razor

This paper presents new experimental evidence against the utility of Occam's razor. A~systematic procedure is presented for post-processing decision trees produced by C4.5. This procedure was derived by rejecting Occam's razor and instead attending to the assumption that similar objects ar...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Journal of artificial intelligence research Vol. 4; pp. 397 - 417
Main Author Webb, G. I.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published San Francisco AI Access Foundation 01.01.1996
Subjects
Artificial intelligence
Cognitive tasks
Decision trees
Machine learning
Post-production processing
Task complexity
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:This paper presents new experimental evidence against the utility of Occam's razor. A~systematic procedure is presented for post-processing decision trees produced by C4.5. This procedure was derived by rejecting Occam's razor and instead attending to the assumption that similar objects are likely to belong to the same class. It increases a decision tree's complexity without altering the performance of that tree on the training data from which it is inferred. The resulting more complex decision trees are demonstrated to have, on average, for a variety of common learning tasks, higher predictive accuracy than the less complex original decision trees. This result raises considerable doubt about the utility of Occam's razor as it is commonly applied in modern machine learning.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-2
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
content type line 23
ISSN:1076-9757
1076-9757
1943-5037
DOI:10.1613/jair.228