An intelligent agent interacting with the real world will encounter individual people, courses, test results, drugs prescriptions, chairs, boxes, etc., and needs to reason about properties of these individuals and relations among them as well as cope with uncertainty. Uncertainty has been studied in probability theory and graphical models, and relations have been studied in logic, in particular in the predicate calculus and its extensions. This book examines the foundations of combining logic and probability into what are called relational probabilistic models. It introduces representations, inference, and learning techniques for probability, logic, and their combinations. The book focuses on two representations in detail: Markov logic networks, a relational extension of undirected graphical models and weighted first-order predicate calculus formula, and Problog, a probabilistic extension of logic programs that can also be viewed as a Turing-complete relational extension of Bayesian networks.

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(Jaege

The interconnected ideas of inductive databases and constraint-based mining are appealing and have the potential to radically change the theory and practice of data mining and knowledge discovery. This book reports on the results of the European IST project "cInQ" (consortium on knowledge discovery by Inductive Queries) and its final workshop entitled Constraint-Based Mining and Inductive Databases organized in Hinterzarten, Germany in March 2004.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Principles of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, PKDD 2001, held in Freiburg, Germany, in September 2001.The 40 revised full papers presented together with four invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from close to 100 submissions. Among the topics addressed are hidden Markov models, text summarization, supervised learning, unsupervised learning, demographic data analysis, phenotype data mining, spatio-temporal clustering, Web-usage analysis, association rules, clustering algorithms, time series analysis, rule discovery, text categorization, self-organizing maps, filtering, reinforcemant learning, support vector machines, visual data mining, and machine learning.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Machine Learning, ECML 2001, held in Freiburg, Germany, in September 2001.The 50 revised full papers presented together with four invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 140 submissions. Among the topics covered are classifier systems, naive-Bayes classification, rule learning, decision tree-based classification, Web mining, equation discovery, inductive logic programming, text categorization, agent learning, backpropagation, reinforcement learning, sequence prediction, sequential decisions, classification learning, sampling, and semi-supervised learning.

This volume contains the proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning 1994, which continues the tradition of earlier meetings and which is a major forum for the presentation of the latest and most significant results in machine learning.
Machine learning is one of the most important subfields of artificial intelligence and computer science, as it is concerned with the automation of learning processes.
This volume contains two invited papers, 19 regular papers, and 25 short papers carefully reviewed and selected from in total 88 submissions.
The papers describe techniques, algorithms, implementations, and experiments in the area of machine learning.

The first textbook ever to cover multi-relational data mining and inductive logic programming, this book fully explores logical and relational learning. Ideal for graduate students and researchers, it also looks at statistical relational learning.

A successful integration of constraint programming and data mining has the potential to lead to a new ICT paradigm with far reaching implications. It could change the face of data mining and machine learning, as well as constraint programming technology. It would not only allow one to use data mining techniques in constraint programming to identify and update constraints and optimization criteria, but also to employ constraints and criteria in data mining and machine learning in order to discover models compatible with prior knowledge. This book reports on some key results obtained on this integrated and cross- disciplinary approach within the European FP7 FET Open project no. 284715 on "Inductive Constraint Programming" and a number of associated workshops and Dagstuhl seminars. The book is structured in five parts: background; learning to model; learning to solve; constraint programming for data mining; and showcases.

This first textbook on multi-relational data mining and inductive logic programming provides a complete overview of the field. It is self-contained and easily accessible for graduate students and practitioners of data mining and machine learning.

Ever since the early days of machine learning and data mining, it has been realized that the traditional attribute-value and item-set representations are too limited for many practical applications in domains such as chemistry, biology, network analysis and text mining. This has triggered a lot of research on mining and learning within alternative and more expressive representation formalisms such as computational logic, relational algebra, graphs, trees and sequences. The motivation for using graphs, trees and sequences. Is that they are 1) more expressive than flat representations, and 2) potentially more efficient than multi-relational learning and mining techniques. At the same time, the data structures of graphs, trees and sequences are among the best understood and most widely applied representations within computer science. Thus these representations offer ideal opportunities for developing interesting contributions in data mining and machine learning that are both theoretically well-founded and widely applicable. The goal of this book is to collect recent outstanding studies on mining and learning within graphs, trees and sequences in studies worldwide.

Inductive Logic Programming is a research area situated in machine learning and logic programming, two subfields of artificial intelligence. The goal of inductive logic programming is to develop theories, techniques and tools for inducing hypotheses from observations using the representations from computational logic. Inductive Logic Programming has a high potential for applications in data mining, automated scientific discovery, knowledge discovery in databases, as well as automatic programming. This book provides a detailed state-of-the-art overview of Inductive Logic Programming as well as a collection of recent technical contributions to Inductive Logic Programming. The state-of-the-art overview is based on - among others - the succesful ESPRIT basic research project no. 6020 on Inductive Logic Programming, funded by the European Commission from 1992 till 1995. It highlights some of the most important recent results within Inductive Logic Programming and can be used as a thorough introduction to the field. This book is relevant to students, researchers and practitioners of artificial intelligence and computer science, especially those concerned with machine learning, data mining and computational logic.