Occam’s razor

The following example in statistics illustrates the principle of Occam’s razor. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_RazorArticle on Occam’s Razor on Wikipedia for a thorough discussion, mathematical or not, of this principle, which is also known as the principle of parsimony.

Example in statistics:

Given the following ten pairs of hypothetical observations of continuous response variable $Y$ and continuous explanatory variable $X$:

Title	Occam’s razor
Canonical name	OccamsRazor
Date of creation	2013-03-22 14:44:14
Last modified on	2013-03-22 14:44:14
Owner	CWoo (3771)
Last modified by	CWoo (3771)
Numerical id	9
Author	CWoo (3771)
Entry type	Definition
Classification	msc 62-07
Classification	msc 00A20
Classification	msc 62A01
Synonym	law of parsimony