Relational Inductive Learning with a Hybrid Evolutionary Algorithm

Article type: Other

Authors: Divina, Federico

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, Free University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands E-mail: divina@cs.vu.nl

Abstract: Inductive learning in First-Order Logic (FOL) is a hard task due to both the prohibitive size of the search space and the computational cost of evaluating hypotheses. This paper describes an evolutionary algorithm for concept learning in (a fragment of) FOL. The algorithm, called ECL (for Evolutionary Concept Learner), evolves a population of Horn clauses by repeated selection, mutation and optimization of more fit clauses. ECL relies on four greedy mutation operators for searching the hypothesis space, and employs an optimization phase that follows each mutation. Experimental results show that ECL works well in practice.

Keywords: Supervised learning, Evolutionary Algorithms, Inductive Logic Programming

Journal: AI Communications, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 67-69, 2005