Symbolic-Numeric Integration of Univariate Expressions based on Sparse Regression

Abstract

Most computer algebra systems (CAS) support symbolic integration as core functionality. The majority of the integration packages use a combination of heuristic algebraic and rule-based (integration table) methods. In this paper, we present a hybrid (symbolic-numeric) methodology to calculate the indefinite integrals of univariate expressions. The primary motivation for this work is to add symbolic integration functionality to a modern CAS (the symbolic manipulation packages of SciML, the Scientific Machine Learning ecosystem of the Julia programming language), which is mainly designed toward numerical and machine learning applications and has a different set of features than traditional CAS. The symbolic part of our method is based on the combination of candidate terms generation (borrowed from the Homotopy operators theory) with rule-based expression transformations provided by the underlying CAS. The numeric part is based on sparse-regression, a component of Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy) technique. We show that this system can solve a large variety of common integration problems using only a few dozen basic integration rules.