In plain words: It hunts for simple formulas that fit data best for their size, using a neural network's gradients to spot reusable building blocks inside the formula. It stays reliable with noisy data far better than earlier formula finders, and solves equations they could not.
Abstract
We present an improved method for symbolic regression that seeks to fit data to formulas that are Pareto-optimal, in the sense of having the best accuracy for a given complexity. It improves on the previous state-of-the-art by typically being orders of magnitude more robust toward noise and bad data, and also by discovering many formulas that stumped previous methods. We develop a method for discovering generalized symmetries (arbitrary modularity in the computational graph of a formula) from gradient properties of a neural network fit. We use normalizing flows to generalize our symbolic regression method to probability distributions from which we only have samples, and employ statistical hypothesis testing to accelerate robust brute-force search.
Silviu-Marian Udrescu, Andrew Tan, Jiahai Feng, Orisvaldo Neto, Tailin Wu, Max Tegmark
arXiv:2006.10782 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.IT, physics.comp-ph, stat.ML · submitted Jun 18, 2020 · updated Dec 16, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · 17 pages, 6 figs, replaced to match accepted NeurIPS version