Why does the FindFormula result contain Abs in result?

Question

If you look at the first example of FindFormula, why is the result Mathematica produces showing an Abs?

 Table[{x, N[x Sin[x]]}, {x, 0, 4, .3}]

 FindFormula[%, x]

The result on the web page is

$$1. x \sin(x)$$

However, when I run the example on V12.0.0. on Windows 10, it returns the result

$$1. ~abs (x) ~\sin(x)$$

All of the $x$ values are positive, so why is MMA adding the abs to the result?

It is as if MMA is figuring how to go back in time, but that is odd given that that is not the data set.

Update

If I kill my MMA session and run this again, it produces the expected result. However, if I rerun the FindFormula command, the Abs results shows up again and continuously shows that same result after re-entering the data and re-running the command.

Answer 1

$Version

(* "12.0.0 for Mac OS X x86 (64-bit) (April 7, 2019)" *)

data = Table[{x, N[x Sin[x]]}, {x, 0, 4, .3}];

FindFormula does not necessarily give a consistent result. Its algorithms make use of a random seed and as the seed evolves so can the results. For example,

Table[FindFormula[data, x], {10}]

(* {1. x Sin[x], x Sin[x], x Sin[x], x Sin[Abs[x]], x Sin[x], 1. x Sin[x], 
 Abs[x] Sin[x], 1. x Sin[x], x Sin[x], x Sin[x]} *)

Using the same seed for each use will give consistent results.

Table[FindFormula[data, x, RandomSeeding -> 1234], {10}]

(* {x Sin[x], x Sin[x], x Sin[x], x Sin[x], x Sin[x], x Sin[x], x Sin[x], 
 x Sin[x], x Sin[x], x Sin[x]} *)

Other option choices can have similar results

Table[FindFormula[data, x, PerformanceGoal -> "Quality", 
  SpecificityGoal -> 1], {10}]

(* {x Sin[x], x Sin[x], x Sin[x], x Sin[x], x Sin[x], x Sin[x], x Sin[x], 
 x Sin[x], x Sin[x], x Sin[x]} *)