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"Probabilistic ILP" - Tutorial


Topic

One of the central open questions in data mining, machine learning and artificial intelligence, concerns probabilistic logic learning, sometimes also called statistical relational learning or probabilistic logic learning:

the integration of relational or logical representations, probabilistic reasoning mechanisms with machine learning and data mining principles.
In the past few years, this question has received a lot of attention. Various different approaches have been developed in several related, but different areas (including machine learning, statistics, inductive logic programming, databases, and reasoning under uncertainty). Most researchers only have exposure to one or two of the constituents underlying probabilistic inductive logic programming:
The tutorial will survey and overview those developments that lie at the intersection of logical (or relational) representations, probabilistic reasoning and learning.
More precisely, we start from inductive logic programming and show
  1. how inductive logic programming (ILP) formalisms, settings and techniques [MD94] can be extended to deal with probabilistic issues, and
  2. how these learning settings for probabilistic inductive logic programming cover state-of-the-art statistical relational learning approaches [DK03].
This, we hope, should allow the attendant to appreciate the differences and commonalities between the various approaches - in particular from a learning perspective - and between {probabilistic ILP and its underlying constituents, ILP and statistical learning. Before describing the tutorial in more detail, let us specify what we mean by Probabilistic Logic Learning. The term probabilistic in our context refers to the use of probabilistic representations and reasoning mechanisms grounded in probability theory, such as Bayesian networks, hidden Markov models, and stochastic grammars. The term logic programming refers to first-order logical and relational representations such as those studied within the field of computational logic. The primary advantage of using first-order logic or relational representations is that it allows one to elegantly represent complex situations involving a variety of objects as well as relations among the objects. The term inductive refers to deriving the different aspects of the probabilistic logic on the basis of data.in the context of probabilistic logic. So,
probabilistic inductive logic programming aims at combining its three underlying constituents: learning and probabilistic reasoning within first-order logical and relational representations.
Frameworks developed include David Poole's probabilistic Horn abduction (PHA) [Poo93], Ngo and Haddawy's probabilistic-logic programs (PLPs) [NH97], Muggleton's stochastic logic programs (SLPs) [Mug96,Cuss00], Sato's PRISM [Sat95,SK01], Koller et al.'s probabilistic relational models (PRMs) [FGKP99,Pfe00,Get01], Jaeger's relational Bayesian networks (RBNs) [Jae97], Kersting and De Raedt's Bayesian logic programs (BLPs) [KD01a,KD01b], Getoor's statistical relational models (SRMs) [Get01], Anderson et al.'s and Kersting et al.'s relational Markov Models [ADW02,KRKD03], Shangai et al.'s dynamic PRMS (DPRMs) [DW03], and many more.

The recent interest in probabilistic logic learning may be explained by the steady growing body of the work addressing the pairwise intersection and by the fact that it diverges from traditional approaches which assume data instances are structurally identical and statistically independent or assume that relationships are deterministic. Therefore, it is not surprising that several workshops (SRL-00 at AAAI, SRL-03 at IJCAI, SRL-04 at ICML, 19th Machine Intelligence workshop on ``Reasoning and Uncertainty: methods and applications'', a recent Dagstuhl seminar on ``Probabilistic, Logical and Relational Learning - Towards a Synthesis''), research projects (EELD, APrIL I, APrIL II, ...), and (invited/honorary) talks (such as Daphne Koller at IJCAI-01, ICML-03/KDD-03 and Foster Provost at ICML-03) addressed this new challenge of machine learning.