AI Feynman: A physics-inspired method for symbolic regression

© 2020 The Authors. A core challenge for both physics and artificial intelligence (AI) is symbolic regression: Finding a symbolic expression that matches data from an unknown function. Although this problem is likely to be NP-hard in principle, functions of practical interest often exhibit symmetrie...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Udrescu, Silviu-Marian, Tegmark, Max
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 2021
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/132379
Description
Summary:© 2020 The Authors. A core challenge for both physics and artificial intelligence (AI) is symbolic regression: Finding a symbolic expression that matches data from an unknown function. Although this problem is likely to be NP-hard in principle, functions of practical interest often exhibit symmetries, separability, compositionality, and other simplifying properties. In this spirit, we develop a recursive multidimensional symbolic regression algorithm that combines neural network fitting with a suite of physics-inspired techniques. We apply it to 100 equations from the Feynman Lectures on Physics, and it discovers all of them, while previous publicly available software cracks only 71; for a more difficult physics-based test set, we improve the state-of-the-art success rate from 15 to 90%.