An Approach to Symbolic Regression Using Feyn

TL;DR

This paper introduces Feyn, a supervised machine learning tool utilizing the QLattice inspired by Feynman's path integral, enabling interpretable symbolic regression for scientific data analysis.

Contribution

The paper presents the Feyn tool and QLattice, a novel approach that combines interpretability with model exploration in symbolic regression, differing from traditional black-box methods.

Findings

QLattice explores multiple models for problem-solving.

Feyn allows user-controlled trade-offs between interpretability and complexity.

Demonstrated application on scientific data sets for data discovery.

Abstract

In this article we introduce the supervised machine learning tool called Feyn. The simulation engine that powers this tool is called the QLattice. The QLattice is a supervised machine learning tool inspired by Richard Feynman's path integral formulation, that explores many potential models that solves a given problem. It formulates these models as graphs that can be interpreted as mathematical equations, allowing the user to completely decide on the trade-off between interpretability, complexity and model performance. We touch briefly upon the inner workings of the QLattice, and show how to apply the python package, Feyn, to scientific problems. We show how it differs from traditional machine learning approaches, what it has in common with them, as well as some of its commonalities with symbolic regression. We describe the benefits of this approach as opposed to black box models. To illustrate this, we go through an investigative workflow using a basic data set and show how the QLattice can help you reason about the relationships between your features and do data discovery.