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Fabricio Olivetti de Franca

Fabricio Olivetti de Franca contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

5 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

A Comparative Study of Model Selection Criteria for Symbolic Regression

Effective model selection is critical in symbolic regression (SR) to identify mathematical expressions that balance accuracy and complexity, and have low expected error on unseen data. Many modern implementations of genetic programming (GP) for SR generate a set of Pareto optimal candidate solutions, but reliable automatic selection of solutions that generalize well remains an open issue. Current literature offers various information-theoretic and Bayesian approaches, yet comprehensive comparisons of their performance across different data regimes are limited. This study presents a systematic empirical comparison of widely used selection criteria: the Akaike information criterion (AIC), the corrected AIC (AICc), the Bayesian information criterion (BIC), minimum description length (MDL), as well as Efron's bootstrap estimate for the in-sample prediction error on seven synthetic datasets with Gaussian noise. We rank candidate expressions generated by perturbing ground-truth functions to assess generalization error and selection probability of the ground-truth expression. Our findings reveal that MDL consistently identifies models with the lowest test error and the shortest length across most datasets. While no single criterion dominates all results, MDL and BIC produced the highest probability of selecting the ground-truth expressions.

preprint2022arXiv

Prediction Intervals and Confidence Regions for Symbolic Regression Models based on Likelihood Profiles

Symbolic regression is a nonlinear regression method which is commonly performed by an evolutionary computation method such as genetic programming. Quantification of uncertainty of regression models is important for the interpretation of models and for decision making. The linear approximation and so-called likelihood profiles are well-known possibilities for the calculation of confidence and prediction intervals for nonlinear regression models. These simple and effective techniques have been completely ignored so far in the genetic programming literature. In this work we describe the calculation of likelihood profiles in details and also provide some illustrative examples with models created with three different symbolic regression algorithms on two different datasets. The examples highlight the importance of the likelihood profiles to understand the limitations of symbolic regression models and to help the user taking an informed post-prediction decision.

preprint2022arXiv

Transformation-Interaction-Rational Representation for Symbolic Regression

Symbolic Regression searches for a function form that approximates a dataset often using Genetic Programming. Since there is usually no restriction to what form the function can have, Genetic Programming may return a hard to understand model due to non-linear function chaining or long expressions. A novel representation called Interaction-Transformation was recently proposed to alleviate this problem. In this representation, the function form is restricted to an affine combination of terms generated as the application of a single univariate function to the interaction of selected variables. This representation obtained competing solutions on standard benchmarks. Despite the initial success, a broader set of benchmarking functions revealed the limitations of the constrained representation. In this paper we propose an extension to this representation, called Transformation-Interaction-Rational representation that defines a new function form as the rational of two Interaction-Transformation functions. Additionally, the target variable can also be transformed with an univariate function. The main goal is to improve the approximation power while still constraining the overall complexity of the expression. We tested this representation with a standard Genetic Programming with crossover and mutation. The results show a great improvement when compared to its predecessor and a state-of-the-art performance for a large benchmark.

preprint2020arXiv

EvoMan: Game-playing Competition

This paper describes a competition proposal for evolving Intelligent Agents for the game-playing framework called EvoMan. The framework is based on the boss fights of the game called Mega Man II developed by Capcom. For this particular competition, the main goal is to beat all of the eight bosses using a generalist strategy. In other words, the competitors should train the agent to beat a set of the bosses and then the agent will be evaluated by its performance against all eight bosses. At the end of this paper, the competitors are provided with baseline results so that they can have an intuition on how good their results are.

preprint2020arXiv

Interaction-Transformation Evolutionary Algorithm for Symbolic Regression

The Interaction-Transformation (IT) is a new representation for Symbolic Regression that restricts the search space into simpler, but expressive, function forms. This representation has the advantage of creating a smoother search space unlike the space generated by Expression Trees, the common representation used in Genetic Programming. This paper introduces an Evolutionary Algorithm capable of evolving a population of IT expressions supported only by the mutation operator. The results show that this representation is capable of finding better approximations to real-world data sets when compared to traditional approaches and a state-of-the-art Genetic Programming algorithm.