ABSTRACT
Famous for Nicolaus Copernicus' heliocentric model of the solar system, Copernicus argued for replacing the geocentric model, because the heliocentric model was more "harmonious." Some notion of simplicity usually features in all of these tools, and so each is commonly compared to Ockham's razor. The most common form of model selection among practicing scientists is to search for a model in which every coefficient is statistically significant. Statisticians sometimes call this stargazing, as it is embodied by scanning for asterisks trailing after estimates. Overfitting occurs when a model learns too much from the sample. What this means is that there are both regular and irregular features in every sample. Parameters summarize relationships among the data. These summaries compress the data into a simpler form, although with loss of the information about the sample.
