Deep Generative Symbolic Regression

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Holt, Samuel, Qian, Zhaozhi, van der Schaar, Mihaela
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Holt, Samuel
Qian, Zhaozhi
van der Schaar, Mihaela
author_facet Holt, Samuel
Qian, Zhaozhi
van der Schaar, Mihaela
contents Symbolic regression (SR) aims to discover concise closed-form mathematical equations from data, a task fundamental to scientific discovery. However, the problem is highly challenging because closed-form equations lie in a complex combinatorial search space. Existing methods, ranging from heuristic search to reinforcement learning, fail to scale with the number of input variables. We make the observation that closed-form equations often have structural characteristics and invariances (e.g., the commutative law) that could be further exploited to build more effective symbolic regression solutions. Motivated by this observation, our key contribution is to leverage pre-trained deep generative models to capture the intrinsic regularities of equations, thereby providing a solid foundation for subsequent optimization steps. We show that our novel formalism unifies several prominent approaches of symbolic regression and offers a new perspective to justify and improve on the previous ad hoc designs, such as the usage of cross-entropy loss during pre-training. Specifically, we propose an instantiation of our framework, Deep Generative Symbolic Regression (DGSR). In our experiments, we show that DGSR achieves a higher recovery rate of true equations in the setting of a larger number of input variables, and it is more computationally efficient at inference time than state-of-the-art RL symbolic regression solutions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_00282
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deep Generative Symbolic Regression
Holt, Samuel
Qian, Zhaozhi
van der Schaar, Mihaela
Machine Learning
I.2.6; I.2.5
Symbolic regression (SR) aims to discover concise closed-form mathematical equations from data, a task fundamental to scientific discovery. However, the problem is highly challenging because closed-form equations lie in a complex combinatorial search space. Existing methods, ranging from heuristic search to reinforcement learning, fail to scale with the number of input variables. We make the observation that closed-form equations often have structural characteristics and invariances (e.g., the commutative law) that could be further exploited to build more effective symbolic regression solutions. Motivated by this observation, our key contribution is to leverage pre-trained deep generative models to capture the intrinsic regularities of equations, thereby providing a solid foundation for subsequent optimization steps. We show that our novel formalism unifies several prominent approaches of symbolic regression and offers a new perspective to justify and improve on the previous ad hoc designs, such as the usage of cross-entropy loss during pre-training. Specifically, we propose an instantiation of our framework, Deep Generative Symbolic Regression (DGSR). In our experiments, we show that DGSR achieves a higher recovery rate of true equations in the setting of a larger number of input variables, and it is more computationally efficient at inference time than state-of-the-art RL symbolic regression solutions.
title Deep Generative Symbolic Regression
topic Machine Learning
I.2.6; I.2.5
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.00282