Abstract Mining patterns is a core task in data analysis and, beyond issues of efficient enumeration, the selection constitutes major challenge. The Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle, model method grounded information theory, has been applied to pattern mining with aim obtain compact high-quality sets patterns. After giving an outline relevant concepts from theory and coding, we review...

Many patterns found in natural language syntax have multiple pos-sible explanations or structural descriptions. Even within the cur-rently dominant Minimalist framework (Chomsky 1995, 2000), it is not uncommon to encounter types of analyses for same phenomenon proposed literature. A question, then, whether one could evaluate and compare syntactic proposals from a quantitative point view. In thi...

From the earliest days of generative grammar, developing a general method for grammar acquisition has been a major goal of linguistic theory. Chomsky (1975) proposed that grammars be selected for their simplicity: the simplest grammar which fits the data is the best one. At that time, no computationally useful definition of simplicity has been available. Recently, the method variously known as ...

We propose a new inductive principle, which we call the complexity approximation principle (CAP). This principle is a natural generalization of Rissanen’s minimum description length (MDL) principle and Wallace’s minimum message length (MML) principle and is based on the notion of predictive complexity, a recent generalization of Kolmogorov complexity. Like the MDL principle, CAP can be regarded...