Improving scalability and efficiency of ILP-based and graph-based concept discovery systems


Tezin Türü: Doktora

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Mühendislik Fakültesi, Bilgisayar Mühendisliği Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2013

Öğrenci: ALEV MUTLU

Danışman: PINAR KARAGÖZ

Özet:

Concept discovery is the problem of finding definitions of target relation in terms or other relation given as a background knowledge. Inductive Logic Programming (ILP)-based and graph-based approaches are two competitors in concept discovery problem. Although ILP-based systems have long dominated the area, graph-based systems have recently gained popularity as they overcome certain shortcomings of ILP-based systems. While having applications in numerous domains, ILP-based concept discovery systems still sustain scalability and efficiency issues. These issues generally arose due to the large search spaces such systems build. In this work we propose memoization-based and parallelization-based methods that modify the search space construction step and the evaluation step of ILP-based concept discovery systems to overcome these problem. In this work we propose three memoization-based methods, called Tabular CRIS, Tabular CRIS-wEF, and Selective Tabular CRIS. In these methods, basically, evaluation queries are stored in look-up tables for later uses. While preserving some core functions in common, each proposed method improves e_ciency and scalability of its predecessor by introducing constraints on what kind of evaluation queries to store in look-up tables and for how long. The proposed parallelization method, called pCRIS, parallelizes the search space construction and evaluation steps of ILP-based concept discovery systems in a data-parallel manner. The proposed method introduces policies to minimize the redundant work and waiting time among the workers at synchronization points. Graph-based approaches were first introduced to the concept discovery domain to handle the so called local plateau problem. Graph-based approaches have recently gained more popularity in concept discovery system as they provide convenient environment to represent relational data and are able to overcome certain shortcomings of ILP-based concept discovery systems. Graph-based approaches can be classified as structure-based approaches and path-finding approaches. The first class of approaches need to employ expensive algorithms such as graph isomorphism to find frequently appearing substructures. The methods that fall into the second class need to employ sophisticated indexing mechanisms to find out the frequently appearing paths that connect some nodes in interest. In this work, we also propose a hybrid method for graph-based concept discovery which does not require costly substructure matching algorithms and path indexing mechanism. The proposed method builds the graph in such a way that similar facts are grouped together and paths that eventually turn to be concept descriptors are build while the graph is constructed.