Thinking Outside the Template with Modular GP-GOMEA

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Harrison, Joe, Bosman, Peter A. N., Alderliesten, Tanja
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Harrison, Joe
Bosman, Peter A. N.
Alderliesten, Tanja
author_facet Harrison, Joe
Bosman, Peter A. N.
Alderliesten, Tanja
contents The goal in Symbolic Regression (SR) is to discover expressions that accurately map input to output data. Because often the intent is to understand these expressions, there is a trade-off between accuracy and the interpretability of expressions. GP-GOMEA excels at producing small SR expressions (increasing the potential for interpretability) with high accuracy, but requires a fixed tree template, which limits the types of expressions that can be evolved. This paper presents a modular representation for GP-GOMEA that allows multiple trees to be evolved simultaneously that can be used as (functional) subexpressions. While each tree individually is constrained to a (small) fixed tree template, the final expression, if expanded, can exhibit a much larger structure. Furthermore, the use of subexpressions decomposes the original regression problem and opens the possibility for enhanced interpretability through the piece-wise understanding of small subexpressions. We compare the performance of GP-GOMEA with and without modular templates on a variety of datasets. We find that our proposed approach generally outperforms single-template GP-GOMEA and can moreover uncover ground-truth expressions underlying synthetic datasets with modular subexpressions at a faster rate than GP-GOMEA without modular subexpressions.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_01262
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Thinking Outside the Template with Modular GP-GOMEA
Harrison, Joe
Bosman, Peter A. N.
Alderliesten, Tanja
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
The goal in Symbolic Regression (SR) is to discover expressions that accurately map input to output data. Because often the intent is to understand these expressions, there is a trade-off between accuracy and the interpretability of expressions. GP-GOMEA excels at producing small SR expressions (increasing the potential for interpretability) with high accuracy, but requires a fixed tree template, which limits the types of expressions that can be evolved. This paper presents a modular representation for GP-GOMEA that allows multiple trees to be evolved simultaneously that can be used as (functional) subexpressions. While each tree individually is constrained to a (small) fixed tree template, the final expression, if expanded, can exhibit a much larger structure. Furthermore, the use of subexpressions decomposes the original regression problem and opens the possibility for enhanced interpretability through the piece-wise understanding of small subexpressions. We compare the performance of GP-GOMEA with and without modular templates on a variety of datasets. We find that our proposed approach generally outperforms single-template GP-GOMEA and can moreover uncover ground-truth expressions underlying synthetic datasets with modular subexpressions at a faster rate than GP-GOMEA without modular subexpressions.
title Thinking Outside the Template with Modular GP-GOMEA
topic Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.01262