Boosting Descriptive ILP for Predictive Learning in Bioinformatics

Abstract

Boosting is an established propositional learning method to promote the predictive accuracy of weak learning algorithms, and has achieved much empirical success. However, there have been relatively few efforts to apply boosting to Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) approaches. We investigate the use of boosting descriptive ILP systems, by proposing a novel algorithm for generating classification rules which searches using a hybrid language bias/production rule approach, and a new method for converting first-order classification rules to binary classifiers, which increases the predictive accuracy of the boosted classifiers. We demonstrate that our boosted approach is competitive with normal ILP systems in experiments with bioinformatics datasets.