SyMANTIC: An Efficient Symbolic Regression Method for Interpretable and Parsimonious Model Discovery in Science and Beyond

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Main Authors: Muthyala, Madhav R., Sorourifar, Farshud, Peng, You, Paulson, Joel A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Muthyala, Madhav R.
Sorourifar, Farshud
Peng, You
Paulson, Joel A.
author_facet Muthyala, Madhav R.
Sorourifar, Farshud
Peng, You
Paulson, Joel A.
contents Symbolic regression (SR) is an emerging branch of machine learning focused on discovering simple and interpretable mathematical expressions from data. Although a wide-variety of SR methods have been developed, they often face challenges such as high computational cost, poor scalability with respect to the number of input dimensions, fragility to noise, and an inability to balance accuracy and complexity. This work introduces SyMANTIC, a novel SR algorithm that addresses these challenges. SyMANTIC efficiently identifies (potentially several) low-dimensional descriptors from a large set of candidates (from $\sim 10^5$ to $\sim 10^{10}$ or more) through a unique combination of mutual information-based feature selection, adaptive feature expansion, and recursively applied $\ell_0$-based sparse regression. In addition, it employs an information-theoretic measure to produce an approximate set of Pareto-optimal equations, each offering the best-found accuracy for a given complexity. Furthermore, our open-source implementation of SyMANTIC, built on the PyTorch ecosystem, facilitates easy installation and GPU acceleration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SyMANTIC across a range of problems, including synthetic examples, scientific benchmarks, real-world material property predictions, and chaotic dynamical system identification from small datasets. Extensive comparisons show that SyMANTIC uncovers similar or more accurate models at a fraction of the cost of existing SR methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_03367
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SyMANTIC: An Efficient Symbolic Regression Method for Interpretable and Parsimonious Model Discovery in Science and Beyond
Muthyala, Madhav R.
Sorourifar, Farshud
Peng, You
Paulson, Joel A.
Machine Learning
Symbolic regression (SR) is an emerging branch of machine learning focused on discovering simple and interpretable mathematical expressions from data. Although a wide-variety of SR methods have been developed, they often face challenges such as high computational cost, poor scalability with respect to the number of input dimensions, fragility to noise, and an inability to balance accuracy and complexity. This work introduces SyMANTIC, a novel SR algorithm that addresses these challenges. SyMANTIC efficiently identifies (potentially several) low-dimensional descriptors from a large set of candidates (from $\sim 10^5$ to $\sim 10^{10}$ or more) through a unique combination of mutual information-based feature selection, adaptive feature expansion, and recursively applied $\ell_0$-based sparse regression. In addition, it employs an information-theoretic measure to produce an approximate set of Pareto-optimal equations, each offering the best-found accuracy for a given complexity. Furthermore, our open-source implementation of SyMANTIC, built on the PyTorch ecosystem, facilitates easy installation and GPU acceleration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SyMANTIC across a range of problems, including synthetic examples, scientific benchmarks, real-world material property predictions, and chaotic dynamical system identification from small datasets. Extensive comparisons show that SyMANTIC uncovers similar or more accurate models at a fraction of the cost of existing SR methods.
title SyMANTIC: An Efficient Symbolic Regression Method for Interpretable and Parsimonious Model Discovery in Science and Beyond
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03367