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Contemporary Symbolic Regression Methods and their Relative Performance

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arxiv 2107.14351 v1 pith:KYCJFG5T submitted 2021-07-29 cs.NE

classification cs.NE
keywords regressionmethodssymbolicbenchmarkequationslearningproblemsreal-world
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Many promising approaches to symbolic regression have been presented in recent years, yet progress in the field continues to suffer from a lack of uniform, robust, and transparent benchmarking standards. In this paper, we address this shortcoming by introducing an open-source, reproducible benchmarking platform for symbolic regression. We assess 14 symbolic regression methods and 7 machine learning methods on a set of 252 diverse regression problems. Our assessment includes both real-world datasets with no known model form as well as ground-truth benchmark problems, including physics equations and systems of ordinary differential equations. For the real-world datasets, we benchmark the ability of each method to learn models with low error and low complexity relative to state-of-the-art machine learning methods. For the synthetic problems, we assess each method's ability to find exact solutions in the presence of varying levels of noise. Under these controlled experiments, we conclude that the best performing methods for real-world regression combine genetic algorithms with parameter estimation and/or semantic search drivers. When tasked with recovering exact equations in the presence of noise, we find that deep learning and genetic algorithm-based approaches perform similarly. We provide a detailed guide to reproducing this experiment and contributing new methods, and encourage other researchers to collaborate with us on a common and living symbolic regression benchmark.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. NestyNet. I. Physics Functions Are Hard to Fit with Neural Networks: A Framework for Accurate Surrogates and Analytic Derivatives

    astro-ph.IM 2026-08 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    NestyNet, a segmented softplus model with analytic derivatives and a second-order optimizer, reports 2,100x better function values and 1,400x better derivatives than Adam-trained MLPs on AI Feynman.

  2. Fast Symbolic Regression Benchmarking

    cs.LG 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A curated-list plus early-termination protocol for symbolic regression benchmarks raises measured rediscovery rates and cuts benchmark compute by roughly half.

  3. Diffusion-Based Symbolic Regression

    cs.LG 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A masked discrete diffusion model trained with token-wise GRPO and a long short-term risk-seeking replay pool improves symbolic regression solution rates and expression simplicity on SRBench.

  4. Bridging the Domain Gap in Equation Distillation with Reinforcement Feedback

    cs.LG 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Reinforcement learning fine-tuning with numerical fitness rewards improves equation discovery accuracy and noise robustness of a pretrained symbolic regression transformer.

  5. Exploring Multi-view Symbolic Regression methods in physical sciences

    cs.LG 2025-09 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Benchmarking four multi-view symbolic regression packages on five real scientific datasets shows all find accurate compact models; parameter limits and shared constants emerge as key design features.

  6. (Exhaustive) Symbolic Regression and model selection by minimum description length

    astro-ph.IM 2025-07 conditional novelty 3.0 of 10

    Exhaustive search over simple functions ranked by description length beats the Friedmann equation, MOND, and common inflaton potentials on astrophysical datasets.

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