Miller comments on What are you working on? June 2012 - Less Wrong

2 Post author: David_Gerard 03 June 2012 11:02AM

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Comment author: Miller 03 June 2012 06:29:44PM *  0 points [-]

recaptures a (badly obfuscated and possibly overfit) variant of it.

How do you overfit Kepler's law?

edit: Retracted. I see now looking at the actual link the result wasn't just obfuscated but wrong, and so the manner in which it's wrong can overfit of course (and that matches the results).

Comment author: othercriteria 03 June 2012 07:29:16PM *  1 point [-]

To the extent that Kepler's laws are exact only for two-body systems of point masses (so I guess calling Kepler's third law the ground truth is a bit problematic) and to the extent that the data are imperfectly observed, there are residuals that over-eager models can try to match.

Edit: More generally, you don't overfit the underlying law, you overfit noisy data generated by the underlying law.

Comment author: Thomas 03 June 2012 08:20:05PM 2 points [-]

Kepler's law holds well. The influences of other planets are negligible for the precision we dealt with.