Mark A. Pitt

The process of inductive inference—to infer general laws and principles from particular instances—is the basis of statistical modeling, pattern recognition, and machine learning. The Minimum Descriptive Length (MDL) principle, a powerful method of inductive inference, holds that the best explanation, given a limited set of observed data, is the one that permits the greatest compression of the data—that the more we are able to compress the data, the more we learn about the regularities underlying the data.