This paper revisits datasets and evaluation criteria for Symbolic Regression, a task of expressing given data using mathematical equations, specifically focused on its potential for scientific discovery. Focused on a set of formulas used in the existing datasets based on Feynman Lectures on Physics, we recreate 120 datasets to discuss the performance of symbolic regression for scientific discovery (SRSD). For each of the 120 SRSD datasets, we carefully review the properties of the formula and its variables to design reasonably realistic sampling range of values so that our new SRSD datasets can be used for evaluating the potential of SRSD such as whether or not an SR method con (re)discover physical laws from such datasets. As an evaluation metric, we also propose to use normalized edit distances between a predicted equation and the ground-truth equation trees. While existing metrics are either binary or errors between the target values and an SR model's predicted values for a given input, normalized edit distances evaluate a sort of similarity between the ground-truth and predicted equation trees. We have conducted experiments on our new SRSD datasets using five state-of-the-art SR methods in SRBench and a simple baseline based on a recent Transformer architecture. The results show that we provide a more realistic performance evaluation and open up a new machine learning-based approach for scientific discovery. Our datasets and code repository are publicly available.

本研究重新审视了Symbolic Regression的数据集和评估标准，旨在探讨其在科学探索中的潜力。我们基于现有物理学讲义上的一组公式重建了120个数据集，为每个数据集设计了合理的取样范围，并提出使用标准化编辑距离作为评价指标。通过对五种最先进的SR方法和一种基于Transformer结构的简单基准线进行实验，结果表明我们提供了更现实的性能评估，并为开展基于机器学习的科学发现打开了新的思路。

重新思考符号回归数据集和基准，以促进科学发现