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Are you sure? A Comprehensive and Comprehensible Survey of Uncertainty Quantification in Symbolic Regression

Summary

Symbolic regression systematically searches the space of mathematical functions to discover models that capture underlying data relationships. Despite recent advances, a lack of uncertainty quantification (UQ) support limits its real-world adoption. This first-of-its-kind survey introduces essential UQ concepts and reviews existing literature on UQ in SR, organized into frequentist, Bayesian, and model selection directions. The authors emphasize that UQ in SR remains underexplored, motivating further research.

SourcearXiv Machine LearningAuthor: Julia Reuter, Fabricio Olivetti de Franca
Are you sure? A Comprehensive and Comprehensible Survey of Uncertainty Quantification in Symbolic Regression
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[2606.06567] Are you sure? A Comprehensive and Comprehensible Survey of Uncertainty Quantification in Symbolic Regression

[Submitted on 4 Jun 2026]

Title:Are you sure? A Comprehensive and Comprehensible Survey of Uncertainty Quantification in Symbolic Regression

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Abstract:Symbolic regression (SR) is a class of methods that systematically explore the space of mathematical functions to discover models that accurately capture the underlying relationships in a dataset. Despite recent advances in the field, a lack of support for uncertainty quantification (UQ) limits its adoption in real-world decision processes. In regression analysis, UQ provides important information about the model reliability, which can both help to avoid overfitting by accounting for uncertainty in the data, and provide insights for decision-making. This survey is the first to clearly address this issue, with the objective of introducing essential UQ concepts and reviewing the current literature on UQ in SR, which can be broadly organized into three research directions: frequentist, Bayesian, and model selection. Despite its importance, UQ in SR is still underexplored, which motivates further research into reliable UQ methods for SR.

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Machine Learning (cs.LG)

Cite as: arXiv:2606.06567 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2606.06567v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.06567

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Julia Reuter [view email] [v1] Thu, 4 Jun 2026 17:29:56 UTC (187 KB)

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Key points and analysis

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Key points

  • Symbolic regression lacks uncertainty quantification support, hindering its use in decision-making.
  • This survey comprehensively reviews UQ methods in SR, categorizing them into frequentist, Bayesian, and model selection approaches.
  • UQ provides model reliability insights, helping prevent overfitting and aiding decisions.
  • UQ in SR is still in its infancy and requires more research.

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