Coding Ockham's Razor

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