
























Abstract:Symbolic regression (SR) with genetic programming (GP) aims to discover interpretable mathematical expressions directly from data. Despite its strong empirical success, the theoretical understanding of why GP-based SR generalizes beyond the training data remains limited. In this work, we provide a learning-theoretic analysis of SR models represented as expression trees. We derive a generalization bound for GP-style SR under constraints on tree size, depth, and learnable constants. Our result decomposes the generalization gap into two interpretable components: a structure-selection term, reflecting the combinatorial complexity of choosing an expression-tree structure, and a constant-fitting term, capturing the complexity of optimizing numerical constants within a fixed structure. This decomposition provides a theoretical perspective on several widely used practices in GP, including parsimony pressure, depth limits, numerically stable operators, and interval arithmetic. In particular, our analysis shows how structural restrictions reduce hypothesis-class growth while stability mechanisms control the sensitivity of predictions to parameter perturbations. By linking these practical design choices to explicit complexity terms in the generalization bound, our work offers a principled explanation for commonly observed empirical behaviors in GP-based SR and contributes towards a more rigorous understanding of its generalization properties.
From: Masahiro Nomura [view email]
[v1]
Sun, 19 Apr 2026 12:12:11 UTC (34 KB)
[v2]
Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:31:20 UTC (35 KB)
此内容由惯性聚合(RSS阅读器)自动聚合整理,仅供阅读参考。 原文来自 — 版权归原作者所有。