Symbolic regression: exploring the polynomial space with probabilistic grammar

As companies collect more and more data, there is a growing need for trained professionals to build models out of those data: humans, however, are costly and do not scale too well. On the opposite side of the spectrum, tools for automated data analysis promise to do everything with one click; in reality they are often just a list of pre-compiled models, with huge variance in accuracy and interpretability.

In this talk, we will try to find some middle ground by taking a fresh look at "symbolic regression", i.e. the idea that you can fit arbitrary datasets by evolving a population of mathematical expressions until you find something that fits data well enough. Instead of taking the standard optimization route provided by genetic algorithms, we will borrow ideas from probabilistic programming to build a small "robot scientist" with webPPL: if mathematics is a language, why can't we use ideas from natural language processing to explore the space of expressions?

We conclude with some comments on model explainability and recent academic work in "compositional" data analysis.

Topics: symbolic regression, automl, probabilistic programming.

Bio:

Jacopo Tagliabue was co-founder, CTO and nerd in chief at Tooso - a Gartner "Cool Vendor" company acquired by Coveo in 2019. Before Tooso, he was a "Best & Brightest" fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and led the Data Science team of AxonVibe in New York. In previous lives, he managed to get a Ph.D. (UNISR/MIT), do scienc-y things for a professional basketball team, simulate a pre-Columbian civilization and give an academic talk on video games (among others improbable "achievements"). His research and industry work has been featured several times in international conferences and the general press.

This event will be held in English.

Agenda:

18:45 Doors opening

19:00 Data Science Milan community opening

19:20 Talk

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About the host:

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MIKAMAI is a leading IT consultancy and development agency in Italy. MIKAMAI has earned its dominant reputation for delivering real value to our clients and being leading innovators in emerging technologies in web and mobile solutions and products of the Internet of Things. We work with different languages and technologies, including but not limited to Ruby (and Ruby/Rails), React, AngularJS, Elixir, Redis and PostgreSQL. We tend to work with containers in mind (we are huge docker fans) and we consider ourselves AWS experts. By combining advanced technological skills, Agile development expertise, and client experiences, we deliver more than just high-quality technology solutions - we help our clients realize their visions, mitigate risk and deliver tangible benefits and value to their projects. We are passionate and take pride in the relationships we have built with our clients. Our areas of expertise are: Esports and Gaming, Fashion, Design, Tourism, Food & Beverage and FinTech. Examples of Mikamai's custom platform and product development include: Multi-user tournament systems for e-sports, CRM, Document Management Systems, Social Media Planner, Digital Asset & Media Planning, Systems for Business Meeting Agenda (trade fairs) and Smart Packaging. MIKAMAI is an AWS Certified Partner and Shopify Partner. To apply for a job at Mikamai please go here: https://goo.gl/forms/j0c0WwlDbdXYCIiF2

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