Probabilistic Inductive Logic Programming. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence

One of the key open questions within arti?cial intelligence is how to combine probability and logic with learning. This question is getting an increased - tentioninseveraldisciplinessuchasknowledgerepresentation,reasoningabout uncertainty, data mining, and machine learning simulateously, resulting in the newlyemergingsub?eldknownasstatisticalrelationallearningandprobabil- ticinductivelogicprogramming.Amajordriving forceisthe explosivegrowth in the amount of heterogeneous data that is being collected in the business and scienti?c world. Example domains include bioinformatics, chemoinform- ics, transportation systems, communication networks, social network analysis, linkanalysis,robotics,amongothers.Thestructuresencounteredcanbeass- pleassequencesandtrees(suchasthosearisinginproteinsecondarystructure predictionandnaturallanguageparsing)orascomplexascitationgraphs,the WorldWideWeb,andrelationaldatabases. This book providesan introduction to this ?eld with an emphasison those methods based on logic programming principles. The book is also the main resultofthesuccessfulEuropeanISTFETprojectno.FP6-508861onAppli- tionofProbabilisticInductiveLogicProgramming(APRILII,2004-2007).This projectwascoordinatedbytheAlbertLudwigsUniversityofFreiburg(Germany, Luc De Raedt) and the partners were Imperial College London (UK, Stephen MuggletonandMichaelSternberg),theHelsinkiInstituteofInformationTe- nology(Finland,HeikkiMannila),theUniversit` adegliStudidiFlorence(Italy, PaoloFrasconi),andtheInstitutNationaldeRechercheenInformatiqueet- tomatiqueRocquencourt(France,FrancoisFages).Itwasconcernedwiththeory, implementationsandapplicationsofprobabilisticinductivelogicprogramming. Thisstructureisalsore?ectedinthebook. The book starts with an introductory chapter to Probabilistic Inductive LogicProgramming byDeRaedtandKersting.Inasecondpart,itprovidesa detailedoverviewofthemostimportantprobabilisticlogiclearningformalisms and systems. We are very pleased and proud that the scientists behind the key probabilistic inductive logic programming systems (also those developed outside the APRIL project) have kindly contributed a chapter providing an overviewoftheircontributions.Thisincludes:relationalsequencelearningte- niques (Kersting et al.), using kernels with logical representations (Frasconi andPasserini),MarkovLogic(Domingosetal.), the PRISMsystem (Satoand Kameya),CLP(BN)(SantosCostaetal.),BayesianLogicPrograms(Kersting andDeRaedt),andtheIndependentChoiceLogic(Poole).Thethirdpartthen provides a detailed account of some show-caseapplications of probabilistic - ductive logic programming, more speci?cally: in protein fold discovery (Chen et al.), haplotyping (Landwehr and Mielik ainen) and systems biology (Fages andSoliman). The ?nal parttouchesupon sometheoreticalinvestigationsand VI Preface includes chaptersonbehavioralcomparisonof probabilisticlogicprogramming representations(MuggletonandChen)andamodel-theoreticexpressivityan- ysis(Jaeger).