A Theory of the Mechanics of Information: Generalization Through Measurement of Uncertainty (Learning is Measuring)
Abstract
Traditional machine learning relies on explicit models and domain assumptions, often limiting flexibility and interpretability. We introduce a "model-free" framework of instance-based learning using surprisal (information theoretic uncertainty) to directly analyze and perform inferences from raw data, eliminating distribution modeling, reducing bias, and enabling efficient updates including direct edits and deletion of training data. By quantifying relevance through uncertainty, the approach enables generalizable inference across tasks including generative inference, causal discovery, anomaly detection, and time series forecasting. Our approach emphasizes traceability, interpretability, and data-driven decision making, offering a unified, human-understandable framework for machine learning, can be adapted to virtually all machine learning tasks, achieving competency across all and state-of-the-art performance on anomaly detection and some supervised tasks. The mathematical foundations create a "physics" of information, which enable these techniques to apply effectively to a wide variety of complex data types, including missing data. Our results suggest that this may be a viable foundation upon which to build scalable machine learning and artificial intelligence that can maintain human understandability of the underlying mechanics.
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