Learning Logic Programs From Noisy Failures

Abstract: Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) is a form of ML which in contrast to many other state of the art ML methods typically produces highly interpretable and reusable models. However, many ILP systems lack the ability to naturally learn from any noisy or partially misclassified training data. We introduce the relaxed learning from failures approach to ILP, a noise handling modification of the previously introduced learning from failures (LFF) approach which is incapable of handling noise. We additionally introduce the novel Noisy Popper ILP system which implements this relaxed approach and is a modification of the existing Popper system. Like Popper, Noisy Popper takes a generate-test-constrain loop to search its hypothesis space wherein failed hypotheses are used to construct hypothesis constraints. These constraints are used to prune the hypothesis space, making the hypothesis search more efficient. However, in the relaxed setting, constraints are generated in a more lax fashion as to avoid allowing noisy training data to lead to hypothesis constraints which prune optimal hypotheses. Constraints unique to the relaxed setting are generated via hypothesis comparison. Additional constraints are generated by weighing the accuracy of hypotheses against their sizes to avoid overfitting through an application of the minimum description length. We support this new setting through theoretical proofs as well as experimental results which suggest that Noisy Popper improves the noise handling capabilities of Popper but at the cost of overall runtime efficiency.