Julia Balla, Sihao Huang, Owen Dugan, Rumen Dangovski, Marin Soljacic
arXiv 2 Oct 2022 · cs.SC · publishedHumanities and Social Sciences Communications (2025) · 4 citations (OpenAlex)
arXiv:2210.00563 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text
In social science, formal and quantitative models, such as ones describing economic growth and collective action, are used to formulate mechanistic explanations, provide predictions, and uncover questions about observed phenomena. Here, we demonstrate the use of a machine learning system to aid the discovery of symbolic models that capture nonlinear and dynamical relationships in social science datasets. By extending neuro-symbolic methods to find compact functions and differential equations in noisy and longitudinal data, we show that our system can be used to discover interpretable models from real-world data in economics and sociology. Augmenting existing workflows with symbolic regression can help uncover novel relationships and explore counterfactual models during the scientific process. We propose that this AI-assisted framework can bridge parametric and non-parametric models commonly employed in social science research by systematically exploring the space of nonlinear models and enabling fine-grained control over expressivity and interpretability.
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The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.
| Reference | Intensity | Mentions | Sections | Main text | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | author author S. L.\ Brunton, author J. L.\ Proctor,\ and\ author J.… (2016) ) NoStop | 0.928 | 5 | 4 | 80% |
| 2 | author author A. Costa, author R. Dangovski, author O. Dugan, author… (2007) 10784 journal journal arXiv:2007.10784 [cs, stat]\ ( year 2021),\ note arXiv: 2007.10784 NoStop | 0.928 | 5 | 3 | 80% |
| 3 | author author R. M.\ Solow,\ title title A Contribution to the Theor… (1956) ) NoStop | 0.874 | 5 | 2 | 100% |
| 4 | author author C. W.\ Cobb\ and\ author P. H.\ Douglas,\ title title… (1928) ),\ note publisher: American Economic Association NoStop | 0.737 | 4 | 2 | 75% |
| 5 | author author R. O.\ Keohane, author G. King,\ and\ author S. Verba,… (2021) ) NoStop | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 6 | author author S.-M.\ Udrescu\ and\ author M. Tegmark,\ title title A… (2020) ),\ note publisher: American Association for the Advancement of Science Section: Research Article NoStop | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 7 | author author J. Leskovec, author J. Kleinberg,\ and\ author C. Falo… (2005) )\ p.\ pages 177 NoStop | 0.644 | 3 | 2 | 67% |
| 8 | author author D. A.\ MacLulich,\ http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138… (1937) ) NoStop | 0.644 | 3 | 2 | 67% |
| 9 | author author Various,\ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Datab… (2009) ),\ note version from 2009-03-06. Stop | 0.644 | 3 | 2 | 67% |
| 10 | author author P. Cardoso, author V. V.\ Branco, author P. A. V.\ Bor… (2020) 530135 journal journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution\ volume 8,\ pages 530135 ( year 2020) NoStop | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
Showing the top 10 of 72 scored citations.