AND Parallelism for ILP: The APIS System

Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) is a well known approach to Multi-Relational Data Mining. ILP systems may take a long time for analyzing the data mainly because the search (hypotheses) spaces are often very large and the evaluation of each hypothesis, which involves theorem proving, may be quite time consuming in some domains. To address these efficiency issues of ILP systems we propose the APIS (And ParallelISm for ILP) system that uses results from Logic Programming AND-parallelism. The approach enables the partition of the search space into sub-spaces of two kinds: sub-spaces where clause evaluation requires theorem proving; and sub-spaces where clause evaluation is performed quite efficiently without resorting to a theorem prover. We have also defined a new type of redundancy (Coverage-equivalent redundancy) that enables the prune of significant parts of the search space. The new type of pruning together with the partition of the hypothesis space considerably improved the performance of the APIS system. An empirical evaluation of the APIS system in standard ILP data sets shows considerable speedups without a lost of accuracy of the models constructed.