MDL
Minimum Description Length
**Minimum Description Length** provides a criterion for the selection of models, regardless of their complexity, without the restrictive assumption that the data form a sample from a 'true' distribution.

Extracted from [scholarpedia](http://scholarpedia.org/article/Minimum_description_length)

**Source**:

Paper: [J. Rissanen (1978) Modeling by the shortest data description. Automatica 14, 465-471](https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-1098(78)90005-5)

Book: [P. D. Grünwald (2007) The Minimum Description Length Principle, MIT Press, June 2007, 570 pages](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/servlet/opac?bknumber=6267274)