An Expectation Maximization Algorithm for Probabilistic Logic Programs

Recently much work in Machine Learning has concentrated on representation languages able to combine aspects of logic and probability, leading to the birth of a whole field called Statistical Relational Learning. In this paper we present a technique for parameter learning targeted to a family of formalisms where uncertainty is represented using Logic Programming tools - the so-called Probabilistic Logic Programs such as ICL, PRISM, ProbLog and LPAD. Since their equivalent Bayesian networks contain hidden variables, an EM algorithm is adopted. In order to speed the computation, expectations are computed directly on the Binary Decision Diagrams that are built for inference. The resulting system, called EMBLEM for ``EM over BDDs for probabilistic Logic programs Efficient Mining'', has been applied to a number of datasets and showed good performances both in terms of speed and memory