Extension of the top-down data-driven strategy to ILP

Abstract

Several upgrades of Attribute-Value learning to Inductive Logic Programming have been proposed and used successfully. However, the Top-Down Data-Driven strategy, popularised by the AQ family, has not yet been transferred to ILP: if the idea of reducing the hypothesis space by covering a seed example is utilised with systems like PROGOL, Aleph or MIO, these systems do not benefit from the associated data-driven specialisation operator. This operator is given an incorrect hypothesis h and a covered negative example e and outputs a set of hypotheses more specific than h and correct wrt e. This refinement operator is very valuable considering heuristic search problems ILP systems may encounter when crossing plateaus in relational search spaces. In this paper, we present the data-driven strategy of AQ, in terms of a lggbased change of representation of negative examples given a positive seed example, and show how it can be extended to ILP. We evaluate a basic implementation of AQ in the system PROPAL on a number of benchmark ILP datasets. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.