Retrieving the Refractive Index of a Biological Material via Symbolic Regression

Modeling the optical properties of biological structures allows the development of novel biocompatible materials. Using two different approaches, we were able to extract a closed-form mathematical expression that accurately models the refractive index of two distinct biological materials. Our approaches rely on Symbolic Regression (SR), a generic numerical implementation based on Genetic Programming (GP) that does not require any initial assumptions about the algebraic form of the model under search. We explore the possibilities and limitations of our SR approach, and the possible extension to solve more complex configurations.