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Analysing Symbolic Regression Benchmarks under a Meta-Learning Approach

Neural and Evolutionary Computing 2018-05-29 v1

Abstract

The definition of a concise and effective testbed for Genetic Programming (GP) is a recurrent matter in the research community. This paper takes a new step in this direction, proposing a different approach to measure the quality of the symbolic regression benchmarks quantitatively. The proposed approach is based on meta-learning and uses a set of dataset meta-features---such as the number of examples or output skewness---to describe the datasets. Our idea is to correlate these meta-features with the errors obtained by a GP method. These meta-features define a space of benchmarks that should, ideally, have datasets (points) covering different regions of the space. An initial analysis of 63 datasets showed that current benchmarks are concentrated in a small region of this benchmark space. We also found out that number of instances and output skewness are the most relevant meta-features to GP output error. Both conclusions can help define which datasets should compose an effective testbed for symbolic regression methods.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1805.10365,
  title  = {Analysing Symbolic Regression Benchmarks under a Meta-Learning Approach},
  author = {Luiz Otavio Vilas Boas Oliveira and Joao Francisco Barreto da Silva Martins and Luis Fernando Miranda and Gisele Lobo Pappa},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.10365},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

8 pages, 3 Figures, Proceedings of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion, Kyoto, Japan

R2 v1 2026-06-23T02:08:56.066Z