Comparison of symbolic regression algorithms in Star/galaxy/quasar separation

Abstract

This work investigates symbolic regression (SR) as an interpretable alternative to black-box machine learning for the classification of stars, galaxies, and quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 17 (SDSS DR17). We conduct a systematic comparative study of four state-of-the-art SR frameworks: {\tt PySR}, Exhaustive Symbolic Regression ({\tt ESR}) with MDL-based selection, Physical Symbolic Optimization ({\tt PhySO}) using deep reinforcement learning, and Multi-View Symbolic Regression ({\tt MvSR}). By deriving compact analytic functions (complexity $\leq$ 10) on a representative training subset and subsequently evaluating them via an 80,000-sample 5-fold cross-validation threshold optimization phase and a subsequent 10,000-sample unseen hold-out test set, we map spectroscopic redshift ($z$) to continuous classification scores. Our results demonstrate that these low-complexity expressions achieve high predictive reliability, with {\tt MvSR} reaching a cross-validation Cohen's Kappa of 0.8956 (0.8876 on the hold-out set) and {\tt PhySO} achieving exceptional parametric stability ($\sigma < 0.002$). We note however that the resulting equations returned by Symbolic regression are purely empirical and no physical significance should be ascribed to these equations.