David H. Wolpert

No Free Lunch Theorems for Search

We show that all algorithms that search for an extremum of a cost function perform exactly the same, according to any performance measure, when averaged over all possible cost f...

Stacked generalization

The relationship between Occam's razor and convergent guessing.

Constructing a generalizer superior to NETtalk via a mathematical theory of generalization

A benchmark for how well neural nets generalize

Collective intelligence for control of distributed dynamical systems

We consider the El Farol bar problem, also known as the minority game (W. B.\nArthur, ``The American Economic Review'', 84(2): 406--411 (1994), D. Challet\nand Y.C. Zhang, ``Phy...

No free lunch theorems for optimization

A framework is developed to explore the connection between effective optimization algorithms and the problems they are solving. A number of “no free lunch ” (NFL) theorems are p...