Discriminative Structure Learning of Markov Logic Networks

Markov Logic Networks (MLNs) combine Markov networks and first-order logic by attaching weights to first-order formulas and viewing these as templates for features of Markov networks. Learning the structure of MLNs is performed by state-of-the-art methods by maximizing the likelihood of a relational database. This can lead to suboptimal results given prediction tasks. On the other hand better results in prediction problems have been achieved by discriminative learning of MLNs weights given a certain structure. In this paper we propose an algorithm for learning the structure of MLNs discriminatively by maximimizing the conditional likelihood of the query predicates instead of the joint likelihood of all predicates. The algorithm chooses the structures by maximizing conditional likelihood and sets the parameters by maximum likelihood. Experiments in two real-world domains show that the proposed algorithm improves over the state-of-the-art discriminative weight learning algorithm for MLNs in terms of conditional likelihood. We also compare the proposed algorithm with the state-of-the-art generative structure learning algorithm for MLNs and confirm the results in [22] showing that for small datasets the generative algorithm is competitive, while for larger datasets the discriminative algorithm outperfoms the generative one.