Interpretable Symbolic Regression for Data Science: Analysis of the 2022 Competition

Year: 2023

Type: preprint

Abstract: Symbolic regression searches for analytic expressions that accurately describe studied phenomena. The main attraction of this approach is that it returns an interpretable model that can be insightful to users. Historically, the majority of algorithms for symbolic regression have been based on evolutionary algorithms. However, there has been a recent surge of new proposals that instead utilize approaches such as enumeration algorithms, mixed linear integer programming, neural networks, and Bayesian optimization. In order to assess how well these new approaches behave on a set of common challenges often faced in real-world data, we hosted a competition at the 2022 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference consisting of different synthetic and real-world datasets which were blind to entrants. For the real-world track, we assessed interpretability in a realistic way by using a domain expert to judge the trustworthiness of candidate models.We present an in-depth analysis of the results obtained in this competition, discuss current challenges of symbolic regression algorithms and highlight possible improvements for future competitions.

Source: arXiv (Cornell University)

DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2304.01117

Institutions: Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard University, Flatiron Institute, University of Utah, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria

Language: English

Topic: Evolutionary Algorithms and Applications

Subfield: Artificial Intelligence

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: U.S. Department of Energy, Carnegie Mellon Portugal, Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo, National Institutes of Health, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, National Institute of General Medical Sciences, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

OpenAlex ID: W4362599070