Learning with Mandelbrot and Julia

Abstract

Recent developments in applied mathematics increasingly employ machine learning (ML)-particularly supervised learning-to accelerate numerical computations, such as solving nonlinear partial differential equations. In this work, we extend such techniques to objects of a more theoretical nature: the classification and structural analysis of fractal sets. Focusing on the Mandelbrot and Julia sets as principal examples, we demonstrate that supervised learning methods-including Classification and Regression Trees (CART), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Multilayer Perceptrons (MLP), and Recurrent Neural Networks using both Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), Random Forests (RF), and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)-can classify fractal points with significantly higher predictive accuracy and substantially lower computational cost than traditional numerical approaches, such as the thresholding technique. These improvements are consistent across a range of models and evaluation metrics. Notably, KNN and RF exhibit the best overall performance, and comparative analyses between models (e.g., KNN vs. LSTM) suggest the presence of novel regularity properties in these mathematical structures. Collectively, our findings indicate that ML not only enhances classification efficiency but also offers promising avenues for generating new insights, intuitions, and conjectures within pure mathematics.