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Symbolic Regression is NP-hard

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arxiv 2207.01018 v3 pith:NNAKNNCK submitted 2022-07-03 cs.NE cs.AI

classification cs.NEcs.AI
keywords modelsnp-hardbeenregressionsymbolictaskaccuratealgorithm
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Symbolic regression (SR) is the task of learning a model of data in the form of a mathematical expression. By their nature, SR models have the potential to be accurate and human-interpretable at the same time. Unfortunately, finding such models, i.e., performing SR, appears to be a computationally intensive task. Historically, SR has been tackled with heuristics such as greedy or genetic algorithms and, while some works have hinted at the possible hardness of SR, no proof has yet been given that SR is, in fact, NP-hard. This begs the question: Is there an exact polynomial-time algorithm to compute SR models? We provide evidence suggesting that the answer is probably negative by showing that SR is NP-hard.

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Cited by 9 Pith papers

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

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