Ontology-Driven Induction of Decision Trees at Multiple Levels of Abstraction

Most learning algorithms for data-driven induction of pattern classifiers (e.g., the decision tree algorithm), typically represent input patterns at a single level of abstraction - usually in the form of an ordered tuple of attribute values. However, in many applications of inductive learning - e.g., scientific discovery, users often need to explore a data set at multiple levels of abstraction, and from different points of view. Each point of view corresponds to a set of ontological (and representational) commitments regarding the domain of interest. The choice of an ontology induces a set of representatios of the data and a set of transformations of the hypothesis space. This paper formalizes the problem of inductive learning using ontologies and data; describes an ontology-driven decision tree learning algorithm to learn classification rules at multiple levels of abstraction; and presents preliminary results to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.

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