Finding True Clusters: On the Importance of Simplicity in Science.

The main point of this paper is to underscore the link between simplicity and truth in an unsupervised machine learning context. More precisely, we argue that parametric and dimensional simplicity are not indicators of truth but the methodological principle that urges us to pay attention to such not...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Erkenntnis Vol. 87; no. 5; pp. 2081 - 2097
Main Authors: Rochefort-Maranda, Guillaume, Liu, Mo
Format: Article
Published: Springer Nature Oct2022
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Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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Summary:The main point of this paper is to underscore the link between simplicity and truth in an unsupervised machine learning context. More precisely, we argue that parametric and dimensional simplicity are not indicators of truth but the methodological principle that urges us to pay attention to such notions of simplicity is truth conducive. The truth that we are looking for are specific geometrical shapes and we know which algorithm can find which shapes provided that we pay attention to parametric and dimensional simplicity.