Robert Adams defends a platonic account of goodness, understood as excellence, claiming that there exists good all other things must resemble, identifying the Good with God. Mark Murphy agrees, but argues this is in need Aristotelian supplementation, resemblance take into thing’s kind-membership. While article will accept something like Murphy’s goodness (but without God), it further develop it...

In this paper a general model is described which measures the goodness of equal-tempered scales. To investigate the nature of this ’goodness’, the consonance measures developed by Euler and Helmholtz are discussed and applied to two different sets of intervals. Based on our model, the familiar 12-tone equal temperament does not have an extraordinary goodness. Others, such as the 19-tone equal t...

This paper discusses a recent development in partial least squares (PLS) path modeling, namely goodness-of-fit indices. In order to illustrate the behavior of the goodness-of-fit index (GoF) and the relative goodness-of-fit index (GoFrel), we estimate PLS path models with simulated data, and contrast their values with fit indices commonly used in covariance-based structural equation modeling. T...

Abstract Maximum likelihood fits to data can be done using binned data (histograms) and unbinned data. With binned data, one gets not only the fitted parameters but also a measure of the goodness of fit. With unbinned data, currently, the fitted parameters are obtained but no measure of goodness of fit is available. This remains, to date, an unsolved problem in statistics. Using Bayes theorem a...

This paper reports our empirical evaluation and comparison of several popular goodness measures for unsupervised segmentation of Chinese texts using Bakeoff-3 data sets with a unified framework. Assuming no prior knowledge about Chinese, this framework relies on a goodness measure to identify word candidates from unlabeled texts and then applies a generalized decoding algorithm to find the opti...

We review two powerful methods to test the Gaussianity of the cosmic microwave background (CMB): one based on the distribution of spherical wavelet coefficients and the other on smooth tests of goodness-of-fit. The spherical wavelet families proposed to analyse the CMB are the Haar and the Mexican Hat ones. The latter is preferred for detecting non-Gaussian homogeneous and isotropic primordial ...

The following is a brief review of three landmark papers of Peter Bickel on theoretical and methodological aspects of nonparametric density and regression estimation and the related topic of goodness-of-fit testing, including a class of semiparametric goodness-of-fit tests. We consider the context of these papers, their contribution and their impact. Bickel’s first work on density estimation wa...

Intermittent fault localization approaches account for the fact that faulty components may fail intermittently by considering a parameter (known as goodness) that quantifies the probability that faulty components may still exhibit correct behavior. Current, state-of-the-art approaches (1) assume that this goodness probability is context independent and (2) do not provide means for integrating p...