Many measurements are required to control thermonuclear plasmas and to fully exploit them scientifically. In the last years JET has shown the potential to generate about 50 Gbytes of data per shot. These amounts of data require more sophisticated data analysis methodologies to perform correct inference and various techniques have been recently developed in this respect. The present paper covers a new methodology to extract mathematical models directly from the data without any a priori assumption about their expression. The approach, based on symbolic regression via genetic programming, is exemplified using the data of the ITPA database for the energy confinement time. The best obtained scaling laws are not in power law form and suggest a revisiting of the extrapolation to ITER. On the other hand, more comprehensive and better databases are required to fully profit from the power of these new methods and to discriminate between the hundreds of thousands of models that they can generate.