Nico Jacobs

Scaling Up Inductive Logic Programming by Learning from Interpretations

When comparing inductive logic programming (ILP) and attribute-value learning techniques, there is a trade-off between expressive power and efficiency. Inductive logic programming techniques are typically more expressive but also less efficient. Therefore, the data sets handled by current inductive logic programming systems are small according to general standards within the data mining community. The main source of inefficiency lies in the assumption that several examples may be related to each other, so they cannot be handled independently.Within the learning from interpretations framework for inductive logic programming this assumption is unnecessary, which allows to scale up existing ILP algorithms. In this paper we explain this learning setting in the context of relational databases. We relate the setting to propositional data mining and to the classical ILP setting, and show that learning from interpretations corresponds to learning from multiple relations and thus extends the expressiveness of propositional learning, while maintaining its efficiency to a large extent (which is not the case in the classical ILP setting).As a case study, we present two alternative implementations of the ILP system TILDE (Top-down Induction of Logical DEcision trees): TILDEclassic, which loads all data in main memory, and TILDELDS, which loads the examples one by one. We experimentally compare the implementations, showing TILDELDS can handle large data sets (in the order of 100,000 examples or 100 MB) and indeed scales up linearly in the number of examples.

Modelling user preferences and mediating agents in electronic commerce

An important ingredient in agent-mediated electronic commerce is the presence of intelligent mediating agents that assist electronic commerce participants (e.g. individual users, other agents, organisations). These mediating agents are in principle autonomous agents that interact with their environments (e.g. other agents and web-servers) on behalf of participants who have delegated tasks to them. For mediating agents a (preference) model of participants is indispensable. In this paper, a generic mediating agent architecture is introduced. Furthermore, we discuss our view of user preference modelling and its need in agent-mediated electronic commerce. We survey the state of the art in the field of preference modelling and suggest that the preferences of electronic commerce participants can be modelled by learning from their behaviour. In particular, we employ an existing machine learning method called inductive logic programming (ILP). We argue that this method can be used by mediating agents to detect regularities in the behaviour of the involved participants and induce hypotheses about their preferences automatically. Finally, we discuss some advantages and disadvantages of using inductive logic programming as a method for learning user preferences and compare this method with other approaches.

From Shell Logs to Shell Scripts

Analysing the use of a Unix command shell is one of the classic applications in the domain of adaptive user interfaces and user modelling. Instead of trying to predict the next command from a history of commands, we automatically produce scripts that automate frequent tasks. For this we use an ILP association rule learner. We show how to speedup the learning task by dividing it into smaller tasks, and the need for a preprocessing phase to detect frequent subsequences in the data. We illustrate this with experiments with real world data.

Detecting Traffic Problems with ILP

Expert systems for decision support have recently been suc- cessfully introduced in road transport management. These systems include knowledge on traffic problem detection and alleviation. The paper describes experiments in automated acquisition of knowledge on traffic problem detection. The task is to detect road sections where a problem has occured (critical sections) from sensor data. It is necessary to use inductive logic programming (ILP) for this purpose as relational back- ground knowledge on the road network is essential. In this paper, we apply three state-of-the art ILP systems to learn how to detect traffic problems and compare their performance to the performance of a propositional learning system on the same problem.

ILP Experiments in Detecting Traffic Problems

Expert systems for decision support have recently been successfully introduced in road transport management. These systems include knowledge on traffic problem detection and alleviation. The paper describes experiments in automated acquisition of knowledge on traffic problem detection. The task is to detect road sections where a problem has occured (critical sections) from sensor data. It is necessary to use inductive logic programming (ILP) for this purpose as relational background knowledge on the road network is essential. Preliminary results show that ILP can be used to successfully learn to detect traffic problems.

Using ILP-Systems for Verification and Validation of Multi-agent Systems

Most applications of inductive logic programming focus on prediction or the discovery of new knowledge. We describe a less common application of ILP namely verification and validation of knowledge based systems and multi-agent systems. Using inductive logic programming, partial declarative specifications of the software can be induced from the behaviour of the software. These rules can be readily interpreted by the designers or users of the software, and can in turn result in changes to the software. The approach outlined was tested in the domain of multi-agent systems, more in particular the RoboCup domain.

Inductive Verification and Validation of the KULRoT RoboCup Team

As in many multi-agent applications, most RoboCup agents are complex systems, hard to construct and hard to check if they behave as intended. We present a technique to verify multi-agent systems based on inductive reasoning. Induction allows to derive general rules from specific examples (e.g. the inputs and outputs of software systems). Using inductive logic programming, partial declarative specifications of the software can be induced. These rules can be readily interpreted by the designers or users of the software, and can in turn result in changes to the software. The approach outlined was used to test the KULRoT RoboCup simulator team, which is briefly described.