  Symbolic regression is an important but challenging research topic in data
mining. It can detect the underlying mathematical models. Genetic programming
(GP) is one of the most popular methods for symbolic regression. However, its
convergence speed might be too slow for large scale problems with a large
number of variables. This drawback has become a bottleneck in practical
applications. In this paper, a new non-evolutionary real-time algorithm for
symbolic regression, Elite Bases Regression (EBR), is proposed. EBR generates a
set of candidate basis functions coded with parse-matrix in specific mapping
rules. Meanwhile, a certain number of elite bases are preserved and updated
iteratively according to the correlation coefficients with respect to the
target model. The regression model is then spanned by the elite bases. A
comparative study between EBR and a recent proposed machine learning method for
symbolic regression, Fast Function eXtraction (FFX), are conducted. Numerical
results indicate that EBR can solve symbolic regression problems more
effectively.
