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From: jair-ed@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov
Subject: New Article, Further Experimental Evidence against ...
Message-ID: <1996Jun4.172455.7212@ptolemy-ethernet.arc.nasa.gov>
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Date: Tue, 4 Jun 1996 17:24:55 GMT
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JAIR is pleased to announce the publication of the following article:

Webb, G.I. (1996)
  "Further Experimental Evidence against the Utility of Occam's Razor", 
   Volume 4, pages 397-417.

   Available in Postscript (217K) and compressed Postscript (89K).
   An online appendix (source code) is also a available (41K).
   For quick access via your WWW browser, use this URL:
     http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/jair/abstracts/webb96a.html
   More detailed instructions are below.

   Abstract: 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.

The article is available via:
   
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    For direct access to this article and related files try:
       http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/jair/abstracts/webb96a.html

 -- Anonymous FTP from either of the two sites below.

    Carnegie-Mellon University (USA):
	ftp://p.gp.cs.cmu.edu/usr/jair/pub/volume4/webb96a.ps
    The University of Genoa (Italy):
	ftp://ftp.mrg.dist.unige.it/pub/jair/pub/volume4/webb96a.ps

    The compressed PostScript file is named webb96a.ps.Z (89K)
    An online appendix is also available, named webb96a-appendix.tar (41K).

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    with the subject AUTORESPOND and our automailer will respond. To
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    (Note: Your mailer might find this file too large to handle.) 
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