Top-Down Pruning in Relational Learning

Pruning is an effective method for dealing with noise in Machine Learning. Recently pruning algorithms, in particular Reduced Error Pruning, have also attracted interest in the field of Inductive Logic Programming. However, it has been shown that these methods can be very inefficient, because most of the time is wasted for generating clauses that explain noisy examples and subsequently pruning these clauses. We introduce a new method which searches for good theories in a top-down fashion to get a better starting point for the pruning algorithm. Experiments show that this approach can significantly lower the complexity of the task without losing predictive accuracy