Inductive Logic Programming

(for Dummies)

Anoop & Hector

Knowledge Discovery in DB (KDD)
“automatic extraction of novel, useful, and valid knowledge
from large sets of data”
Different Kinds of:
• Knowledge
– Rules
– Decision trees
– Cluster hierarchies
– Association rules
– Statistically unusual subgroups
• Data

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 Relational Analysis
Would it not be nice to have analysis methods and
data mining systems capable of directly working
with multiple relations as they are available in
relational database systems?

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 Single Table vs Relational DM
The same problems still remain.
But solutions?

More problems:
• Extending the key notations
• Efficiency concerns

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 Relational Data Mining
Data Mining : ML :: Relational Data Mining : ILP

Initially
Binary Classification

Now
Classification, Regression, Clustering,
Association Analysis
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 ILP?
• India Literacy Project?
• International Language Program?
• Individualized Learning Program?
• Instruction Level Parallelism?
• International Lithosphere Program?

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 ILP
Inductive Logic Programming:
• Is a sub-area of Machine Learning, that in turn
is part of Artificial Intelligence
• Uses contributions from Logic Programming
and Statistics
• Tries to automate the induction processes

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 Deductive Vs Inductive Reasoning
T U B  E (deduce)
mother(mary,vinni). parent(mary,vinni).
parent(X,Y) :- mother(X,Y).
parent(X,Y) :- father(X,Y). mother(mary,andre). parent(mary,andre).
father(carrey,vinni).
parent(carrey,vinni).
parent(carrey,andre).
father(carry,andre).

E U B  T (induce)

parent(mary,vinni). mother(mary,vinni).
parent(X,Y) :- mother(X,Y).
parent(mary,andre). mother(mary,andre). parent(X,Y) :- father(X,Y).
parent(carrey,vinni). father(carrey,vinni).
parent(carrey,andre).
father(carry,andre).

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 ILP: Objective
Given a dataset:
• Positive examples (E+) and optionally negative examples (E-)
• Additional knowledge about the problem/application domain (Background
Knowledge B)
• Set of constraints to make the learning process more efficient (C)

Goal of an ILP system is to find a set of hypothesis that:

• Explains (covers) the positive examples - Completeness
• Are consistent with the negative examples - Consistency

h ∈ H : ∀p ∈ P : covers(h, p) Λ ∀n ∈ N : ¬ covers(h, n).

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 DB vs. Logic Programming
DB Terminology LP Terminology
• Relation name p • Predicate symbol p
• Attribute of relation p • Argument of predicate p
• Tuple <a1,…,an> • Ground fact p(a1,…,an)
• Relation p • Predicate p
a set of tuples defined extensionally by a
set of ground facts
• Relation q • Predicate q
defined as a view defined intentionally by a
set of rules (clauses)

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 Relational Pattern
IF Customer(C1,Age1,Income1,TotSpent1,BigSpender1)
AND MarriedTo(C1,C2)
AND Customer(C2,Age2,Income2,TotSpent2,BigSpender2)
AND Income2≥10000
THEN BigSpender1 = Yes

big_spender(C1,Age1,Income1,TotSpent1) ←
married_to(C1,C2) ∧
customer(C2,Age2,Income2,TotSpent2,BigSpender2) ∧
Income2 ≥10000

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 A Generic ILP Algorithm
procedure ILP (Examples)
INITIALIZE (Theories, Examples)
repeat
T = SELECT (Theories, Examples)
{Ti}ni=1 = REFINE (T, Examples)
Theories = REDUCE (Theories U Ui =1Ti, Examples)
n

until STOPPINGCRITERION (Theories, Examples)

return (Theories)

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 Procedures for a Generic ILP Algo.
• INITIALIZE: initialize a set of theories
(e.g. Theories = {true} or Theories = Examples)
• SELECT: select the most promising candidate theory
• REFINE: apply refine operators that guarantee new theories
(specialization, generalization,…).
• REDUCE: discard unpromising theories
• STOPPINGCRITERION: determine whether the current set of theories
is already good enough
(e.g. when it contains a complete and consistent theory)
SELECT and REDUCE together implement the search strategy.
(e.g. hill-climbing: REDUCE = only keep the best theory.)

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 Search Algorithms
Search Methods
– Systematic Search
• Depth-first search
• Breadth-first search
• Best-first search
– Heuristic Search
• Hill-climbing
• Beam-search
Search Direction
– Top-down search: Generic to specific
– Bottom-up search: Specific to general
– Bi-directional search

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 Example

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 Search Space

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 Search Space

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 Search Space as Lattice
• Search space is a lattice under -subsumption
• There exists a lub and glb for every pair of
clauses
• lub is ‘least general generalization’
• Bottom-up approaches find the lgg of the
positive examples

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 Basics of ILP cont’d
• Bottom-up approach of finding clauses leads to long
clauses through lgg.
• Thus, prefer top-down approach since shorter and more
general clauses are learned
• Two ways of doing top-down search
– FOIL: greedy search using information gain to score
– PROGOL: branch-and-bound, using P-N-l to score, uses saturation
to restrict search space
• Usually, refinement operator is to
– Apply substitution
– Add literal to body of a clause

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 FOIL
• Greedy search, score each clause using information gain:
– Let c1 be a specialization of c2
– Then WIG(c1) (weighted information gain) is
WIG(c1,c 2 ) = p2⊕⊕ ( I (c1 ) − I (c 2 ))
p
I(c) = − log 2
p+n

– Where p is the number of possible bindings that make the clause
cover positive examples, p is the number of positive examples
€ covered and n is the number of negative examples covered.
– Background knowledge (B) is limited to ground facts.

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 PROGOL
• Branch and bound top-down search
• Uses P-N-l as scoring function:
– P is number of positive examples covered
– N is number of negative examples covered
– l is the number of literals in the clause
• Preprocessing step: build a bottom clause using a positive example and B to
restrict search space.
• Uses mode declarations to restrict language
• B not limited to ground facts
• While doing branch and bound top-down search:
– Only use literals appearing in bottom clause to refine clauses.
– Learned literal is a generalization of this bottom clause.
• Can set depth bound on variable chaining and theorem proving

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 Example of Bottom Clause
E + = { p(a), p(b)} modes : p(var)
E − = { p(c), p(d)} q (var, var)
B = {r(a,b),r(a,c),r(c,d), r (var, const )
q(X,Y ) ← r(Y, X )} r (var, var)
• Select a seed from positive examples, p(a), randomly or by order (first
uncovered positive example)
€ • Gather all relevant literals (by forward chaining add anything from B
that is allowable)
p(a) ← r(a,b),r(a,c),r(c,d),q(b,a),
q(c,a),q(d,c),r(a,b),r(a,c),r(c,d)
• Introduce variables as required by modes
p(A) ← r(A,b),r(A,c),r(C,d),q(B, A),
€ q(C, A),q(D,C),r(A,B),r(A,C),r(C,D)
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 Iterate to Learn Multiple Rules
• Select seed from positive examples to build
bottom clause.
• Get some rule “If A  B then P”. Now throw
away all positive examples that were covered by
this rule
• Repeat until there are no more positive examples.

First seed - + -
selected
+ + ++
- Second seed
+ -
+ + -- -+ + selected
First rule
- -
learned
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 From Last Time
• Why ILP is not just Decision Trees.
– Language is First-Order Logic
• Natural representation for multi-relational settings
• Thus, a natural representation for full databases
– Not restricted to the classification task.
– So then, what is ILP?

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 What is ILP?
(An obscene generalization)
• A way to search the space of First-Order
clauses.
– With restrictions of course
 -subsumption and search space ordering
– Refinement operators:
• Applying substitutions
• Adding literals
• Chaining variables

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 More From Last Time
• Evaluation of hypothesis requires finding
substitutions for each example.
– This requires a call to PROLOG for each
example
– For PROGOL only one substitution required
– For FOIL all substitutions are required (recall
the p in scoring function)

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 An Example: MIDOS
• A system for finding statistically-interesting
subgroups
– Given a population and its distribution over
some class
– Find subsets of the population for which the
distribution over this class is significantly
different (an example)
– Uses ILP-like search for definitions of
subgroups

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 MIDOS
• Example:
– A shop-club database
• customer(ID, Zip, Sex, Age, Club)
• order(C_ID, O_ID, S_ID, Pay_mode)
• store(S_ID, Location)
– Say want to find good_customer(ID)
– FOIL or PROGOL might find:
• good_customer(C) :- customer(C,_,female,_,_),
order(C,_,_,credit_card).

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 MIDOS
• Instead, let’s find a subset of customers that
contain an interesting amount of members
– Target: [member, non_member]
– Reference Distribution: <66.1%,33.9%> 1371 total
– customer(C,_,female,_,_), order(C,_,_,credit_card).
Distribution: <69.9%, 30.1%> 478 total 1.54 %%

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 MIDOS
• How-to:
– Build a clause in an ILP fashion
– Refinement operators:
• Apply a substitution (to a constant, for example)
• Add a literal (uses given foreign link relationships)
– Use a score for ‘statistical interest’
– Do a beam search

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 MIDOS
• ‘Statistically-interesting’ scoring
g 2

1− g
• ∑ ( p0 i − pi )
i=1..n

– g: relative size of subgroup

– p0i: relative frequency of value i in entire population
€
– pi: relative frequency of value i in subgroup

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 MIDOS
• Example
– 1378 total population, 478 female credit card
buyers
– 906 members in total population, 334 members
among female credit card buyers:
g 2

1− g
• ∑ ( p0 i − pi )
i=1..n

478
1378 • ⎡ 906 − 334
2
+ 472 − 144
2
⎤ = 0.00154
⎢⎣( 1378 478) ( 1378 )
478 ⎥⎦
1− 4781378
€
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 Scaling in Data Mining
• Scaling to large datasets
– Increasing number of training examples
• Scaling to size of the examples
– Increasing number of ground facts in
background knowledge

[Tang, Mooney, Melville, UT Austin, MRDM (SIGKDD) 2003.]

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 BETHE
• Addresses scaling to number of ground facts in
background knowledge
• Problem: PROGOL bottom-clause is too big
– This makes search space too big
• Solution: don’t build a bottom clause
– Use FOIL-like search, BUT
– Guide search using some seed example

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 Efficiency Issues
• Representational Aspects
• Search
• Evaluation
• Sharing computations
• Memory-wise scalability

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 Representational Aspects
• Example:
– Student(string sname, string major, string minor)
– Course(string cname, string prof, string cred)
– Enrolled(string sname, string cname)
• In a natural join of these tables there is a one-to-one
correspondance between join result and the Enrolled table
• Data mining tasks on the Enrolled table are really
propositional
• MRDM is overkill

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 Representational Aspects
• Three settings for data mining:
– Find patterns within individuals represented as tuples
(single table, propositional)
• eg. Which minor is chosen with what major
– Find patterns within individuals represented as sets of
tuples (each individual ‘induces’ a sub-database)
• Multiple tables, restricted to some individual
• eg. Student X taking course A, usually takes course B
– Find patters within whole database
• Mutliple tables
• eg. Course taken by student A are also taken by student B

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 Search
• Space restriction
– Bottom clauses as seen above
• Syntactical biases and typed logic
– Modes as seen above.
– Can add types to variables to further restrict language
• Search biases and pruning rules
– PROGOL’s bound (relies on anti-monotonicity of
coverage)
• Stochastic search

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 Evaluation
• Evaluating a clause: get some measure of
coverage
– Match each example to the clause:
• Run multiple logical queries.
– Query optimization methods from DB
community
• Rel. Algebra operator reordering
• BUT: queries for DB are set oriented (bottom-up),
queries in PROLOG find a single solution (top-
down).
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 Evaluation
• More options
– k-locality, given some bindings, literals in a clause
become independent:
• eg. ?- p(X,Y),q(Y,Z),r(Y,U).
• Given a binding for Y, proofs of q and r are independent
• So, find only one solution for q, if no solution found for r no
need to backtrack.
– Relax -subsumption using stochastic estimates
• Sample space of substitutions and decide on subsumption
based on this sample

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 Sharing Computations
• Materialization of features
• Propositionalization
• Pre-compute some statistics
– Joint distribution over attributes of a table
– Query selectivity
• Store proofs, reuse when evaluating new
clauses

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 Memory-wise scalability
• All full ILP systems work on memory
databases
– Exception: TILDE: learns multi-relational
decision trees
• The trick: make example loop the outer loop
• Current solution:
– Encode data compactly

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 References
• Dzeroski and Lavrac, Relational Data Mining,
Springer, 2001.
• David Page, ILP: Just Do It, ILP 2000.
• Tang, Mooney, Melville, Scaling Up ILP to Large
Examples: Results on Link Discovery for Counter
Terrorism, MRDM 2003.
• Blockeel, Sebag: Scalability and efficiency in multi-
relational data mining. SIGKDD Explorations 5(1) July
2003

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