Learning hierarchical probabilistic logic programs

Probabilistic logic programming (PLP) combines logic programs and probabilities. Due to its expressiveness and simplicity, it has been considered as a powerful tool for learning and reasoning in relational domains characterized by uncertainty. Still, learning the parameter and the structure of general PLP is computationally expensive due to the inference cost. We have recently proposed a restriction of the general PLP language called hierarchical PLP (HPLP) in which clauses and predicates are hierarchically organized. HPLPs can be converted into arithmetic circuits or deep neural networks and inference is much cheaper than for general PLP. In this paper we present algorithms for learning both the parameters and the structure of HPLPs from data. We first present an algorithm, called parameter learning for hierarchical probabilistic logic programs (PHIL) which performs parameter estimation of HPLPs using gradient descent and expectation maximization. We also propose structure learning of hierarchical probabilistic logic programming (SLEAHP), that learns both the structure and the parameters of HPLPs from data. Experiments were performed comparing PHIL and SLEAHP with PLP and Markov Logic Networks state-of-the art systems for parameter and structure learning respectively. PHIL was compared with EMBLEM, ProbLog2 and Tuffy and SLEAHP with SLIPCOVER, PROBFOIL+, MLB-BC, MLN-BT and RDN-B. The experiments on five well known datasets show that our algorithms achieve similar and often better accuracies but in a shorter time.