Guest editorial to the special issue on inductive logic programming, mining and learning in graphs and statistical relational learning

摘要

In 2009, three international conferences/workshops on learning from relational, graph-based and probabilistic data were co-located: ILP-2009, the 19th International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming; MLG-2009, the 7th International Workshop on Mining and Learning with Graphs; and SRL-2009, the International Workshop on Statistical Relational Learning. These events were organized in Leuven, Belgium, on July 2-4, 2009. The ILP conference series has been the premier forum for work on logic-based approaches to learning for almost two decades and has recently reached out to other forms of relational learning and to probabilistic approaches. The MLG workshop series focuses on graph-based approaches to machine learning and data mining while the SRL workshop series focuses on statistical inference and learning with relational and first-order logical representations. The combination of probability theory with relational (or first-order logic) knowledge representation has been the subject of much recent research. While the three series clearly have their own identity, there is a significant overlap in the topics covered by each of them. In particular, the problem they study is essentially the same: learning from structured data involving multiple objects as well as the relationships that hold amongst them. The aim of the colocation was to increase the interaction between the three communities. The format of the joint event stimulated such interaction by providing joint invited speakers and tutorials, joint sessions and poster sessions, and ample time and space for discussions in smaller groups, in addition to the regular programs of the three events. For SRL and MLG, there were no formal proceedings though a post-conference proceedings has been published for ILP, in Volume 5989 of Springer's Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series. In addition, the authors of eight papers, selected at the event, were invited to submit an extended version of their paper to the special issue, and of these, five papers were accepted after two rounds or reviewing.