- Eureqa was discontinued when DataRobot acquired Nutonian
- TuringBot uses simulated annealing—finds solutions Eureqa couldn't (arXiv:2010.11328)
- Free version available—simple installer, no environment setup needed
- 16 built-in search metrics including F1 score for rare event classification
Eureqa is a symbolic regression software based on genetic programming. Here we will talk about an alternative to that software called TuringBot.
About Eureqa
Eureqa used to be developed by a company called Nutonian. A few years ago this company was acquired by a consulting company called Data Robot, and Eureqa was removed from the market after that.
The program gained popularity due to its ease of use. Finding mathematical formulas from data using its graphical interface was very convenient and required no coding.
The alternative: TuringBot
An alternative to Eureqa exists and is called TuringBot. It uses a completely different approach to solve symbolic regression problems, based on a simulated annealing algorithm. It can be downloaded for free from the official website.
TuringBot vs. Eureqa Comparison
| Feature | TuringBot | Eureqa |
|---|---|---|
| Availability | Active development | Discontinued |
| Algorithm | Simulated annealing | Genetic programming |
| Feynman benchmark | More efficient, solves more problems | Baseline |
| Free version | Yes | No |
| Ease of use | GUI, no coding required | GUI, no coding required |
Here is what the TuringBot interface looks like:
It features a variety of search metrics, allowing many different kinds of machine-learning models to be solved. Those include the basic RMS and mean error regression metrics, but also classification accuracy, F1 score (for rare event classification), and correlation coefficient.
The code allows overfit solutions to be easily ruled out with its convenient cross-validation feature. A test/train split can be enabled through the interface, and the out-of-sample error shown in the solutions box can be used to select the formula with the best trade-off between size and accuracy.
A recent paper has compared the performances of Eureqa and TuringBot (arXiv:2010.11328). It found that TuringBot discovers formulas more efficiently than Eureqa and that it is capable of solving problems for which Eureqa could not find a solution at all. The problems used in this evaluation were Physics-inspired and extracted from the famous book The Feynman Lectures on Physics.
More information
If the concept of TuringBot sounds interesting to you, you can visit:
For an introduction to Symbolic Regression, you can also check out the Wikipedia article on the topic.