Data

As data scientists, a great deal of time is often spent getting data into a particular format. It is overly-ambitious to claim that we have solved this problem, but we try to reduce the time spent cleaning data.

The format we use is similar to Prolog, but with a clear distinction between data and programs.

Machine Learning is often described as learning a function over a vector \(x\) such that we can learn a target value \(y\).

\[f(x) = P( y | x )\]

Defining Terms

The terms we invoke to describe these functions are Positives, Negatives, Facts, and Background Knowledge.

  • Positive examples are true (or correct) examples that we want to learn from.
  • Negative examples are false (or incorrect), examples that we do not want to do.
  • Facts are features we use to learn. We make the assumption that some combination of the facts can be used to distinguish between positives and negatives.
  • Background Knowledge comes in many forms, but is a way to introduce more information to learn more effectively. If a classifier is learning to distinguish handwritten digits, extra negative examples might be created by rotating digits. Background Knowledge about this domain might involve not rotating “6” and “9”, since they are identical when rotated.

Background Knowledge is often described as the “black magic” or “expert knowledge” in machine learning. Many of our methods are designed to effectively incorporate this kind of knowledge, and solicit it in a variety of ways.

Format

Positives, negatives, and facts are contained in pos.txt, neg.txt, and facts.txt. Some examples are contained in the testDomains directory at the base of this repository.

For example: testDomains/HeartAttack/train/:

pos.txt neg.txt facts.txt 
ha(p1)
ha(p6)

ha(p2)
ha(p3)
ha(p4)
ha(p5)
ha(p7)
ha(p8)
ha(p9)
ha(p10)

chol(p1,high)
race(p1,r1)
chol(p2,medium)
race(p2,r1)
chol(p3,medium)
race(p3,r1)
chol(p4,medium)
race(p4,r1)
chol(p5,low)
race(p5,r1)
chol(p6,high)
race(p6,r2)
chol(p7,medium)
race(p7,r2)
chol(p8,medium)
race(p8,r2)
chol(p9,medium)
race(p9,r2)
chol(p10,low)
race(p10,r2)

ha(person)
chol(+person,[low;medium;high])
race(+person,[r1;r2])

Positve

The latter are inspired by the FOIL method and paper.