I am pleased to announce a recently created web-resource for Minimum Description Length (MDL) research at
http://www.mdl-research.org/ The site is maintained by the Complex Systems Computation Group (CoSCo) at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology. We will be gradually building the resource to be more comprehensive, and all feedback and comments are appreciated. Henry Tirri Brief description of the site: ============================== What is MDL? The purpose of statistical modeling is to discover regularities in observed data. The success in finding such regularities can be measured by the length with which the data can be described. This is the rationale behind the Minimum Description Length (MDL) Principle introduced by Jorma Rissanen (Rissanen, 1978). "The MDL Principle is a relatively recent method for inductive inference. The fundamental idea behind the MDL Principle is that any regularity in a given set of data can be used to compress the data, i.e. to describe it using fewer symbols than needed to describe the data literally." (Gr�nwald, 1998) What is mdl-research.org? Minimum Description Length on the Web is intended as a source of information for everyone who wants to know more about MDL. The site contains links and references to suggested reading, tutorials, lecture notes, etc. on MDL as well as links to people who are working on MDL and related topics. The Reading section contains references to selected articles, books, and lecture material, and links to journals and conferences that publish MDL related material. The Demonstrations section will illustrate MDL through on-line demonstrations. The section is under construction but you can already find a demonstration on Markov chain order selection. The People section has links to researchers who are working on MDL and related fields. You can find loads of related material in their homepages. The Related Topics section is a short collection of links to MDL related topics, such as information theory, Bayesian statistics, etc. It can help you locate useful background knowledge. References: J.Rissanen, Modeling by shortest data description. Automatica, vol. 14 (1978), pp. 465-471. Peter Gr�nwald, The Minimum Description Length Principle and Reasoning under Uncertainty, Ph.D. Thesis, ILLC Dissertation Series DS 1998-03, CWI, the Netherlands, 1998. - ----------------------------------------------------------- Henry Tirri, PhD. Research Director, Prof. of Computer Science Complex Systems Computation Group Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) http://www.hiit.fi/henry.tirri; email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - -----------------------------------------------------------
