Eureqa is a proprietary modeling engine originally created by
Cornell
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach a ...
's Artificial Intelligence Lab and later commercialized by Nutonian, Inc. The software uses
evolutionary search to determine mathematical equations that describe sets of data in their simplest form. This task is generally referred to as
symbolic regression
Symbolic regression (SR) is a type of regression analysis that searches the space of mathematical expressions to find the model that best fits a given dataset, both in terms of accuracy and simplicity.
No particular model is provided as a start ...
in the literature.
Origin and Development
Since the 1970s, the primary way companies have performed
data science has been to hire teams of data scientists, and equip them with tools like
R,
Python
Python may refer to:
Snakes
* Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia
** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia
* Python (mythology), a mythical serpent
Computing
* Python (pro ...
,
SAS, and
SQL to execute predictive and statistical modeling. In 2007, Michael Schmidt, then a PhD student in Computational Biology at Cornell, believed that the volume of data and complexity of problems that humans could solve were ever-increasing, and the number of data scientists was not. Instead of relying on more ''people'' to fill the data science gap, Schmidt and his advisor,
Hod Lipson
Hod Lipson (born 1967) is an Israeli - American robotics engineer. He is the director of Columbia University's Creative Machines Lab. Lipson's work focuses on evolutionary robotics, design automation, rapid prototyping, artificial life, and creat ...
, invented Eureqa, believing machines could extract meaning from data automatically. Eureqa is an artificial intelligence-powered "Virtual Data Scientist" that automatically builds predictive and analytical models, and allows domain experts to rapidly iterate on them.
TechCrunch
TechCrunch is an American online newspaper focusing on high tech and startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare.
In 2010, AOL acquired the company for approximately $ ...
has called Eureqa one of the first examples of Machine Intelligence – the subfield of A.I. that automates the discovery and explanation of answers from data.
In early November 2009 the program was made available to download for
free by anyone.
Lipson described the machine's benefit in dealing with fields that are overwhelmed with data but lack theory to explain it.
In the October 2011 edition of "Physical Biology", Lipson described a yeast experiment that predicted seven known equations.
This took place after Lipson had asked scientists from different disciplines to share their work to test Eureqa's versatility.
The program was named Eureqa after
Archimedes' famous expression "
Eureka
Eureka (often abbreviated as E!, or Σ!) is an intergovernmental organisation for research and development funding and coordination. Eureka is an open platform for international cooperation in innovation. Organisations and companies applying th ...
!", with the ''k'' replaced by a ''q'' to evoke the word ''equation''.
Technology
Eureqa works by creating random equations with the data through
evolutionary search.
Most of the equations do not fit the data well, but a few of the equations will fit the data better than the others and those will be used as the basis of a new round of several billion more equations until a sufficiently good fit is reached.
This has been used to discover formula with "invariant relationships", such as
laws of nature.
Reception and Use
As of 2015, over 80,000 people, including researchers, students, and
Fortune 500 companies have made use of the program.
People have used the application for many uses, such as analyzing the herding of cattle and understanding the behavior of the stock market.
References
External links
*
*
{{computable knowledge
Semantic Web
Genetic programming