Applications of inductive logic programming
Communications of the ACM
Relational data mining applications: an overview
Relational Data Mining
Four suggestions and a rule concerning the application of ILP
Relational Data Mining
No Unbiased Estimator of the Variance of K-Fold Cross-Validation
The Journal of Machine Learning Research
Gradient-Based Optimization of Hyperparameters
Neural Computation
Design and Analysis of Experiments
Design and Analysis of Experiments
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Reports of experiments conducted with an Inductive Logic Programming system rarely describe how specific values of parameters of the system are arrived at when constructing models. Usually, no attempt is made to identify sensitive parameters, and those that are used are often given "factory-supplied" default values, or values obtained from some non-systematic exploratory analysis. The immediate consequence of this is, of course, that it is not clear if better models could have been obtained if some form of parameter selection and optimisation had been performed. Questions follow inevitably on the experiments themselves: specifically, are all algorithms being treated fairly, and is the exploratory phase sufficiently well-defined to allow the experiments to be replicated? In this paper, we investigate the use of parameter selection and optimisation techniques grouped under the study of experimental design. Screening and "response surface" methods determine, in turn, sensitive parameters and good values for these parameters. This combined use of parameter selection and response surface-driven optimisation has a long history of application in industrial engineering, and its role in ILP is investigated using two well-known benchmarks. The results suggest that computational overheads from this preliminary phase are not substantial, and that much can be gained, both on improving system performance and on enabling controlled experimentation, by adopting well-established procedures such as the ones proposed here.