On the connection between the phase transition of the covering test and the learning success rate in ILP

It is well-known that heuristic search in ILP is prone to plateau phenomena. An explanation can be given after the work of Giordana and Saitta: the ILP covering test is NP-complete and therefore exhibits a sharp phase transition in its coverage probability. As the heuristic value of a hypothesis depends on the number of covered examples, the regions "yes" and "no" represent plateaus that need to be crossed during search without an informative heuristic value. Several subsequent works have extensively studied this finding by running several learning algorithms on a large set of artificially generated problems and argued that the occurrence of this phase transition dooms every learning algorithm to fail to identify the target concept. We note however that only generate-and-test learning algorithms have been applied and that this conclusion has to be qualified in the case of data-driven learning algorithms. Mostly building on the pioneering work of Winston on near-miss...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: ML
• Authors: Érick Alphonse, Aomar Osmani
• Keywords: Heuristic Value, Learning Algorithms, Machine Learning, ML 2008, Phase Transition