Learning Dynamics with Synchronous, Asynchronous and General Semantics

Abstract

Learning from interpretation transition (LFIT) automatically constructs a model of the dynamics of a system from the observation of its state transitions. So far, the systems that LFIT handles are restricted to synchronous deterministic dynamics, i.e., all variables update their values at the same time and, for each state of the system, there is only one possible next state. However, other dynamics exist in the field of logical modeling, in particular the asynchronous semantics which is widely used to model biological systems. In this paper, we focus on a method that learns the dynamics of the system independently of its semantics. For this purpose, we propose a modeling of multi-valued systems as logic programs in which a rule represents what can occur rather than what will occur. This modeling allows us to represent non-determinism and to propose an extension of LFIT in the form of a semantics free algorithm to learn from discrete multi-valued transitions, regardless of their update schemes. We show through theoretical results that synchronous, asynchronous and general semantics are all captured by this method. Practical evaluation is performed on randomly generated systems and benchmarks from biological literature to study the scalability of this new algorithm regarding the three aforementioned semantics.