# An equivalence between two state-of-the-art symbolic regression systems

I was lucky enough to be present at the presentation of two state-of-the-art genetic programming symbolic regression systems – Trent McConaghy’s Fast Function Extraction at GPTP 2011 and Leonardo Vanneschi and colleagues’ implementation of Alberto Moraglio and colleagues’ geometric semantic GP at EuroGP 2013. When I first understood FFX and GSGP I was very impressed – it felt like we were taking real steps forward with symbolic regression.

After thinking quite hard about them both, and playing a bit with code, I came to a realisation that the two methods are very similar, if you look at them the right way.

## Fast Function Extraction (FFX)

McConaghy starts with a question: what would it take for SR to become a technology? An example of a technology, in his sense, is linear regression: it’s fast, reliable, and deterministic. It achieves this at the cost of being inflexible. GPSR is not a technology in this sense: it is slow, non-deterministic, and it can fail. Sometimes it fails once in every 10 runs on an easy problem; sometimes it fails 10 times on what we expected to be a solvable problem. Even when multiple runs achieve equally good results, the models produced are almost never exactly the same. This can be both a strength of GPSR (a route towards ensemble methods) and a weakness (it is harder to explain to a client that none of the resulting models is “the” model).

FFX addresses this by doing away with the GP aspect of SR. I will describe a “caricature” version of FFX. It starts with a set of independent variables, say X0 and X1. Then it expands this set to include some simple transformations of the independent variables, such as X2 = sqrt(X0) and X3 = abs(X1). Then it expands further to include more recombinations such as X4 = X2 * X1. This process generates a set of a few thousand variables (7100 in one example), which are then put into a linear regression, y = b0X0 + b1X1 + … + b7100X7100. Linear regression finds good values for the coefficients bi very fast. In fact, it is not vanilla linear regression, but an elastic net, which tends (tunably) to push a large number of the coefficients bi to zero. The result is a model which is highly readable.

## Geometric Semantic Genetic Programming (GSGP)

Moraglio has always pushed the idea that we must understand EC operators as geometric: mutation should produce results within a ball surrounding the original; crossover offspring should lie on a line segment between their parents (interpretation of these statements in a non-Euclidean space, like that of GP tree genotypes, requires the definition of a distance metric for the space). But the big insight of Moraglio et al is that after all this time, the relationship between genotype and semantics in tree-based GP turns out to be easy to understand. Or at least, easy enough to allow the definition of geometric mutation and crossover operators which have the above properties when viewed in the semantic space, ie the space of vectors of outputs. Since fitness is equivalent to Euclidean distance in semantic space, this transforms the fitness landscape into a unimodal one, which is easily solved. Although both Moraglio and colleagues and then Vanneschi and colleagues tried out both crossover and mutation, there is a consensus, backed up by results from both, that a mutation-only hill-climber is sufficient for a unimodal space.

That is the version I will describe. The mutation operator is simple. Starting with a tree t, mutation produces a new tree tm = t + ms * (tr1 - tr2). Here tr1 and tr2 are randomly-generated trees, so the output of (tr1 - tr2) when run on the vector of fitness cases is a vector with expected value (0, 0, …, 0). ms is the mutation step, a constant which defines the radius of the mutation ball. The output of tm is a vector drawn from the ball around the output of t.

I did a few quick runs using a hill-climber with GSGP mutation. In my implementation the initial point in the hill-climber, and the random trees tr1 and tr2, are generated using the grow operator with maximum depth 2 (counting a single-node tree root as depth 0). That might not be optimal but it’s ok for now. A typical result after just 10 steps, 7 of which were accepted by the hill-climber, is a tree like this – where ms = 0.01:

['+', ['+', ['+', ['+', ['+', ['+', ['+', ['-', ['/', 'x221', 'x44'],
['+', 'x189', 'x233']],
['*', 0.01, ['-', ['+', 'x191', ['/', 'x3', 'x211']],
['-', ['/', 'x141', 'x153'], ['*', 'x79', 'x5']]]]],
['*', 0.01, ['-', 'x8', ['-', ['-', 'x148', 'x187'], 'x218']]]],
['*', 0.01, ['-', ['/', ['/', 'x80', 'x225'],
['*', 'x74', 'x134']], ['*', 'x34', ['-', 'x41', 'x119']]]]],
['*', 0.01, ['-', 'x118', 'x57']]],
['*', 0.01, ['-', 'x124', ['-', ['/', 'x103', 'x138'],
['+', 'x21', 'x81']]]]],
['*', 0.01, ['-', ['*', ['-', 'x104', 'x141'],
['-', 'x223', 'x56']], ['-', 'x11', ['+', 'x183', 'x60']]]]],
['*', 0.01, ['-', ['+', 0.5, ['*', 'x18', 'x23']],
['-', 'x167', 'x47']]]]


There are several things to notice, which are possibly obvious by looking at the mutation operator. The tree is already very large: in fact it grows at each step by 4 nodes plus the size of tr1 and tr2. The tree starts with lots of + operators, so it is a sum of subtrees. Each such subtree is ms * (tr1 - tr2) = ms * tr1 - ms * tr2. Thus the tree is a linear combination of tr1s and tr2s.

## Shared strengths and limitations of FFX and GSGP

This is the similarity between FFX and GSGP. Each produces a model which is a linear combination of small subtrees. These small subtrees in FFX are the basis functions; in GSGP the small subtrees are the tr1 and tr2 subtrees. The coefficients in the linear combination are the bi values in FFX; the ms values in GSGP. Both FFX and GSGP work by exploiting the fact that linear combinations are well-behaved and well-understood.

Neither method, then, is a universal approximator, ie cannot represent every possible arithmetic function, unless the subtrees are allowed to become arbitrarily large. Of course, in practice standard GP is not a universal approximator either, because of practical limits on tree size and depth; however in principle and in practice, standard GP can produce far more flexible models than the linear combinations of small subtrees characteristic of FFX and GSGP.

Results with these methods suggest that the problems tackled so far do not require universal approximators. However this suggests a possible route to constructing a problem which is hard for FFX or GSGP: it should be deeply non-linear, ie should feature non-linearities from root to leaf, and larger than the allowed size of the method’s subtrees. Such a function would not be in the search space for either method.

Note that re-introducing the GSGP crossover operator would change the situation somewhat: it again produces a sum of subtrees, but now each subtree multiplies a parent tree by a random tree tr. However, there is still a strong limitation on the type of model which can be output by the method.

A main difference between FFX and GSGP is that FFX uses a (relatively small) fixed set of subtrees, and chooses among them optimally and deterministically, whereas GSGP does not have a predefined set of subtrees, but generates them randomly from among a possibly larger space.