Degrees of freedom expresses a bound on the complexity of things you can represent. The motivation of this work was a conversation about the over complexity of

Degrees of freedom expresses a bound on the complexity of things you can represent. The motivation of this work was a conversation about the over complexity of a scentific model. You literally count the free params and if there are loads of parameters you need zillions of observations to pin them down due to the curse of dimensionality. It's the same concept in parametric statistics: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrees_of_freedom_(statistics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrees_of_freedom_(statisti... Non-parametric statistics work by fitting models of infinite degrees of freedom. But then you need fancy math to figure out how complex your model currently is and how your data supports it.