{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/symbolic-regression-outperforms-other-models","title":"Symbolic regression outperforms other models for small data sets","arxiv_id":"2103.15147","date":"2021-03-28","proceeding":null,"authors":["Casper Wilstrup","Jaan Kasak"],"abstract":"Machine learning is often applied in health science to obtain predictions and new understandings of complex phenomena and relationships, but an availability of sufficient data for model training is a widespread problem. Traditional machine learning techniques, such as random forests and gradient boosting, tend to overfit when working with data sets of only a few hundred observations. This study demonstrates that for small training sets of 250 observations, symbolic regression generalises better to out-of-sample data than traditional machine learning frameworks, as measured by the coefficient of determination R2 on the validation set. In 132 out of 240 cases, symbolic regression achieves a higher R2 than any of the other models on the out-of-sample data. Furthermore, symbolic regression also preserves the interpretability of linear models and decision trees, an added benefit to its superior generalisation. The second best algorithm was found to be a random forest, which performs best in 37 of the 240 cases. When restricting the comparison to interpretable models, symbolic regression performs best in 184 out of 240 cases.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.15147v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.15147v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"symbolic-regression-outperforms-other-models","repo_url":"https://github.com/wilstrup/sr-small-data","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"machine-learning","task_name":"BIG-bench Machine Learning"},{"task_slug":"symbolic-regression","task_name":"Symbolic Regression"},{"task_slug":"regression-1","task_name":"regression"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}