Evidence map›Paper›PMID 29434042›Full record

ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018

Maximizing the information learned from finite data selects a simple model.

Henry H Mattingly, Mark K Transtrum, Michael C Abbott, Benjamin B Machta

Open access · bronzeAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
17citing papers in PubMed
57.4field-weighted citation impact, top 1% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

17 citing papers in PubMed, 56 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. Article
  2. Support Size ofEntropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026
    Article
  3. Article
  4. How Occam's razor guides human decision-making.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025
    Article
  5. Article
  6. Article
  7. Article
  8. Information geometry for multiparameter models: new perspectives on the origin of simplicity.Reports on progress in physics. Physical Society (Great Britain) · 2022
    Review
  9. Article
  10. Causal Geometry.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020
    Article
  11. Article
  12. Article
  13. Article
  14. Article
  15. Article
  16. Article
  17. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.

Henry H MattinglyDepartment of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544.
Mark K TranstrumDepartment of Physics and Astronomy, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602.
Michael C AbbottMarian Smoluchowski Institute of Physics, Jagiellonian University, 30-348 Kraków, Poland; abbott@th.if.uj.edu.pl benjamin.machta@yale.edu.ORCID 0000-0003-1091-6357
Benjamin B MachtaLewis-Sigler Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544; abbott@th.if.uj.edu.pl benjamin.machta@yale.edu.
Princeton University · USBrigham Young University · USJagiellonian University · PL

Funding

Dynamics of epithelial morphogenesisR01GM107103 · NIGMS · PRINCETON UNIVERSITY · PI SHVARTSMAN, STANISLAV Y. · 2014 to 2017
$1.2M
NIGMS NIH HHS R01 GM107103
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

We use the language of uninformative Bayesian prior choice to study the selection of appropriately simple effective models. We advocate for the prior which maximizes the mutual information between parameters and predictions, learning as much as possible from limited data. When many parameters are poorly constrained by the available data, we find that this prior puts weight only on boundaries of the parameter space. Thus, it selects a lower-dimensional effective theory in a principled way, ignoring irrelevant parameter directions. In the limit where there are sufficient data to tightly constrain any number of parameters, this reduces to the Jeffreys prior. However, we argue that this limit is pathological when applied to the hyperribbon parameter manifolds generic in science, because it leads to dramatic dependence on effects invisible to experiment.

Indexed as

Models, StatisticalAlgorithmsBayes TheoremBayesian prior choiceeffective theoryinformation theorymodel selectionrenormalization group

Identifiers

PMID29434042
PMCPMC5828598
OpenAlexW2786580861

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.