Hierarchical Bayesian Operator-induced Symbolic Regression Trees for Structural Learning of Scientific Expressions

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Hauptverfasser: Roy, Somjit, Dey, Pritam, Pati, Debdeep, Mallick, Bani K.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Roy, Somjit
Dey, Pritam
Pati, Debdeep
Mallick, Bani K.
author_facet Roy, Somjit
Dey, Pritam
Pati, Debdeep
Mallick, Bani K.
contents The advent of Scientific Machine Learning has heralded a transformative era in scientific discovery, driving progress across diverse domains. Central to this progress is uncovering scientific laws from experimental data through symbolic regression. However, existing approaches are dominated by heuristic algorithms or data-hungry black-box methods, which often demand low-noise settings and lack principled uncertainty quantification. Motivated by interpretable Statistical Artificial Intelligence, we develop a hierarchical Bayesian framework for symbolic regression that represents scientific laws as ensembles of tree-structured symbolic expressions endowed with a regularized tree prior. This coherent probabilistic formulation enables full posterior inference via an efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm, yielding a balance between predictive accuracy and structural parsimony. To guide symbolic model selection, we develop a marginal posterior-based criterion adhering to the Occam's window principle and further quantify structural fidelity to ground truth through a tailored expression-distance metric. On the theoretical front, we establish near-minimax rate of Bayesian posterior concentration, providing the first rigorous guarantee in context of symbolic regression. Empirical evaluation demonstrates robust performance of our proposed methodology against state-of-the-art competing modules on a simulated example, a suite of canonical Feynman equations, and single-atom catalysis dataset.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_19710
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hierarchical Bayesian Operator-induced Symbolic Regression Trees for Structural Learning of Scientific Expressions
Roy, Somjit
Dey, Pritam
Pati, Debdeep
Mallick, Bani K.
Methodology
Statistics Theory
Machine Learning
The advent of Scientific Machine Learning has heralded a transformative era in scientific discovery, driving progress across diverse domains. Central to this progress is uncovering scientific laws from experimental data through symbolic regression. However, existing approaches are dominated by heuristic algorithms or data-hungry black-box methods, which often demand low-noise settings and lack principled uncertainty quantification. Motivated by interpretable Statistical Artificial Intelligence, we develop a hierarchical Bayesian framework for symbolic regression that represents scientific laws as ensembles of tree-structured symbolic expressions endowed with a regularized tree prior. This coherent probabilistic formulation enables full posterior inference via an efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm, yielding a balance between predictive accuracy and structural parsimony. To guide symbolic model selection, we develop a marginal posterior-based criterion adhering to the Occam's window principle and further quantify structural fidelity to ground truth through a tailored expression-distance metric. On the theoretical front, we establish near-minimax rate of Bayesian posterior concentration, providing the first rigorous guarantee in context of symbolic regression. Empirical evaluation demonstrates robust performance of our proposed methodology against state-of-the-art competing modules on a simulated example, a suite of canonical Feynman equations, and single-atom catalysis dataset.
title Hierarchical Bayesian Operator-induced Symbolic Regression Trees for Structural Learning of Scientific Expressions
topic Methodology
Statistics Theory
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19710