1,442 research outputs found
Learning programs by learning from failures
We describe an inductive logic programming (ILP) approach called learning
from failures. In this approach, an ILP system (the learner) decomposes the
learning problem into three separate stages: generate, test, and constrain. In
the generate stage, the learner generates a hypothesis (a logic program) that
satisfies a set of hypothesis constraints (constraints on the syntactic form of
hypotheses). In the test stage, the learner tests the hypothesis against
training examples. A hypothesis fails when it does not entail all the positive
examples or entails a negative example. If a hypothesis fails, then, in the
constrain stage, the learner learns constraints from the failed hypothesis to
prune the hypothesis space, i.e. to constrain subsequent hypothesis generation.
For instance, if a hypothesis is too general (entails a negative example), the
constraints prune generalisations of the hypothesis. If a hypothesis is too
specific (does not entail all the positive examples), the constraints prune
specialisations of the hypothesis. This loop repeats until either (i) the
learner finds a hypothesis that entails all the positive and none of the
negative examples, or (ii) there are no more hypotheses to test. We introduce
Popper, an ILP system that implements this approach by combining answer set
programming and Prolog. Popper supports infinite problem domains, reasoning
about lists and numbers, learning textually minimal programs, and learning
recursive programs. Our experimental results on three domains (toy game
problems, robot strategies, and list transformations) show that (i) constraints
drastically improve learning performance, and (ii) Popper can outperform
existing ILP systems, both in terms of predictive accuracies and learning
times.Comment: Accepted for the machine learning journa
Logical Reduction of Metarules
International audienceMany forms of inductive logic programming (ILP) use metarules, second-order Horn clauses, to define the structure of learnable programs and thus the hypothesis space. Deciding which metarules to use for a given learning task is a major open problem and is a trade-off between efficiency and expressivity: the hypothesis space grows given more metarules, so we wish to use fewer metarules, but if we use too few metarules then we lose expressivity. In this paper, we study whether fragments of metarules can be logically reduced to minimal finite subsets. We consider two traditional forms of logical reduction: subsumption and entailment. We also consider a new reduction technique called derivation reduction, which is based on SLD-resolution. We compute reduced sets of metarules for fragments relevant to ILP and theoretically show whether these reduced sets are reductions for more general infinite fragments. We experimentally compare learning with reduced sets of metarules on three domains: Michalski trains, string transformations, and game rules. In general, derivation reduced sets of metarules outperform subsumption and entailment reduced sets, both in terms of predictive accuracies and learning times
Qualitative System Identification from Imperfect Data
Experience in the physical sciences suggests that the only realistic means of
understanding complex systems is through the use of mathematical models.
Typically, this has come to mean the identification of quantitative models
expressed as differential equations. Quantitative modelling works best when the
structure of the model (i.e., the form of the equations) is known; and the
primary concern is one of estimating the values of the parameters in the model.
For complex biological systems, the model-structure is rarely known and the
modeler has to deal with both model-identification and parameter-estimation. In
this paper we are concerned with providing automated assistance to the first of
these problems. Specifically, we examine the identification by machine of the
structural relationships between experimentally observed variables. These
relationship will be expressed in the form of qualitative abstractions of a
quantitative model. Such qualitative models may not only provide clues to the
precise quantitative model, but also assist in understanding the essence of
that model. Our position in this paper is that background knowledge
incorporating system modelling principles can be used to constrain effectively
the set of good qualitative models. Utilising the model-identification
framework provided by Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) we present empirical
support for this position using a series of increasingly complex artificial
datasets. The results are obtained with qualitative and quantitative data
subject to varying amounts of noise and different degrees of sparsity. The
results also point to the presence of a set of qualitative states, which we
term kernel subsets, that may be necessary for a qualitative model-learner to
learn correct models. We demonstrate scalability of the method to biological
system modelling by identification of the glycolysis metabolic pathway from
data
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