Why Simple Models Are Often Better

The significance of Occam’s Razor in data science and machine learning

Thomas A Dorfer
Towards Data Science
8 min readJan 26, 2023

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A picture of Scrabble tiles that spell out the word “SIMPLE”.
Photo by Pablo Arroyo on Unsplash

In data science and machine learning, simplicity is an important concept that can have significant impact on model characteristics such as performance and interpretability. Over-engineered solutions tend to adversely affect these characteristics by increasing the likelihood of…

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