Rashomon Effect & Machine Learning

Rashomon is a wonderful Japanese movie in which four people, from different vantage points, witness an incident in which one person dies and another is supposedly raped. When they come to testify in court, they all report the same facts, but their stories of what happened are very different. What I call the Rashomon Effect is that there is often a multitude of different descriptions in a class of functions giving about the same minimum error rate.

Leo Breiman, Statistical Science, Vol. 16, No. 3. (Aug., 2001), pp. 199-215.