If we ignore the low level details, it’s fairly obvious what the AIC does: on the left we have a term that increases as the model predictions get worse; on the right we have a term that increases as t...If we ignore the low level details, it’s fairly obvious what the AIC does: on the left we have a term that increases as the model predictions get worse; on the right we have a term that increases as the model complexity increases. where N is the number of observations, p is the number of predictors in the full model (not including the intercept), and k is the difference in the number of parameters between the two models.