Fitting propensity (FP) is defined as a model's average ability to fit diverse data patterns, all else being equal. The relevance of FP to model selection is examined in the context of structural equation modeling (SEM). In SEM it is well known that the number of free model parameters influences FP, but other facets of FP are routinely excluded from consideration. It is shown that models posses...

Dennett’s (1971, 1987) ideas about the intentional stance have elicited different reactions from philosophers and scientists. Philosophers have focused on Dennett’s alleged anti-realism about the mental while scientists have focused on his three-way distinction among zero-order, first-order, and second-order intentionality. For most philosophers, anti-realism (at least concerning the mental sta...

This paper describes POPE-GP, a system that makes use of the NSGA-II multiobjective evolutionary algorithm as an alternative, parameter-free technique for eliminating program bloat. We test it on a classification problem and find that while vastly reducing program size, the technique does improve generalisation performance. Program Bloat, the phenomenon of ever-increasing program size during a ...

Morgan’s Canon is a specific restating of Occam’s Razor that dictates that any description of animal behavior should never call upon higher order psychological processes if the behavior could, fairly, be explained in terms of lower processes. Herein, the Canon is discussed both historically and in light of current research into animal behavior. A reconsideration of the principle of parsimony, t...

This paper aims at a better understanding in the impact of simplification in a sequential analysis of activitydiary data using a feature selection method. To this effect, the predictive performance of the Albatross model, which incorporates nine different facets of activity-travel behaviour, based on the original full decision trees is compared with the performance of the model based on trimmed...

Phylogenetic inference aims at reconstructing the evolutionary relationships of different species given some data (e.g. DNA, RNA or proteins). Traditionally, the relationships between species were assumed to be treelike, so the most frequently used phylogenetic inference methods like Maximum Parsimony were originally introduced to reconstruct phylogenetic trees. However, it has been well-known ...

BACKGROUND It has been suggested that statistical parsimony network analysis could be used to get an indication of species represented in a set of nucleotide data, and the approach has been used to discuss species boundaries in some taxa. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Based on 635 base pairs of the mitochondrial protein-coding gene cytochrome c oxidase I (COI), we analyzed 152 nemertean spec...

Phylogenetics is a science of determining connections between groups of organisms in terms of ancestor/descendent relationships, usually expressed by phylogenetic trees, also called “trees of life”, cladograms, or dendograms. In parsimony approach to reconstruct the phylogenetic trees, the goal is to find the most parsimonious tree, i.e., the tree requiring the smallest number/score of evolutio...

Rodrigo, A.G. (1989). An information-rich character weighting procedure for parsimony analysis. New Zealand Natural Sciences 16: 97-103. A weighting procedure is proposed which takes account of prior information pertaining to the characters used in a parsimony analysis. This information comes from specific knowledge about the biology of the group in question, as well as general evolutionary the...

Morphological data provide the only means of classifying the majority of life's history, but the choice between competing phylogenetic methods for the analysis of morphology is unclear. Traditionally, parsimony methods have been favoured but recent studies have shown that these approaches are less accurate than the Bayesian implementation of the Mk model. Here we expand on these findings in sev...