Smooth Symbolic Regression: Transformation of Symbolic Regression into a Real-Valued Optimization Problem

The typical methods for symbolic regression produce rather abrupt changes in solution candidates. In this work, we have tried to transform symbolic regression from an optimization problem, with a landscape that is so rugged that typical analysis methods do not produce meaningful results, to one that can be compared to typical and very smooth real-valued problems. While the ruggedness might not interfere with the performance of optimization, it restricts the possibilities of analysis. Here, we have explored different aspects of a transformation and propose a simple procedure to create real-valued optimization problems from symbolic regression problems.