Abstract
Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) is a Machine Learning research field that has been quite successful in knowledge discovery in relational domains. ILP systems use a set of pre-classified examples (positive and negative) and prior knowledge to learn a theory in which positive examples succeed and the negative examples fail. In this paper we present a novel ILP system called April, capable of exploring several parallel strategies in distributed and shared memory machines.

Abstract
We present a new, efficient and scalable tool, named BIORED, for pattern discovery in proteomic and genomic sequences. It uses a genetic algorithm to find interesting patterns in the form of regular expressions, and a new efficient pattern matching procedure to count pattern occurrences. We studied the performance, scalability and usefulness of BIORED using several databases of biosequences. The results show that BIORED was successful in finding previously known patterns, thus an excellent indicator for its potential. BIORED is available for download under the GNU Public License at http://www.dcc.fc.up.pt/bi-ored/. An online demo is available at the same address.

Abstract
Inductive logic programming (ILP) is a sub-field of machine learning that provides an excellent framework for multi-relational data mining applications. The advantages of ILP have been successfully demonstrated in complex and relevant industrial and scientific problems. However, to produce valuable models, ILP systems often require long running times and large amounts of memory. In this paper we address fundamental issues that have direct impact on the efficiency of ILP systems. Namely, we discuss how improvements in the indexing mechanisms of an underlying logic programming system benefit ILP performance. Furthermore, we propose novel data structures to reduce memory requirements and we suggest a new lazy evaluation technique to search the hypothesis space more efficiently. These proposals have been implemented in the April ILP system and evaluated using several well-known data sets. The results observed show significant improvements in running time without compromising the accuracy of the models generated. Indeed, the combined techniques achieve several order of magnitudes speedup in some data sets. Moreover, memory requirements are reduced in nearly half of the data sets. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract
The growth of machine-generated relational databases, both in the sciences and in industry, is rapidly outpacing our ability to extract useful information from them by manual means. This has brought into focus machine learning techniques like Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) that are able to extract human-comprehensible models for complex relational data. The price to pay is that ILP techniques are not efficient: they can be seen as performing a form of discrete optimisation, which is known to be computationally hard; and the complexity is usually some super-linear function of the number of examples. While little can be done to alter the theoretical bounds on the worst-case complexity of ILP systems, some practical gains may follow from the use of multiple processors. In this paper we survey the state-of-the-art on parallel ILP. We implement several parallel algorithms and study their performance using some standard benchmarks. The principal findings of interest are these: (1) of the techniques investigated, one that simply constructs models in parallel on each processor using a subset of data and then combines the models into a single one, yields the best results; and (2) sequential (approximate) ILP algorithms based on randomized searches have lower execution times than (exact) parallel algorithms, without sacrificing the quality of the solutions found.

Abstract

Abstract
This work aims at improving the scalability of memory usage in Inductive Logic Programming systems. In this context, we propose two efficient data structures: the Trie, used to represent lists and clauses; and the RL-Tree, a novel data structure used to represent the clauses coverage. We evaluate their performance in the April system using well known datasets. Initial results show a substantial reduction in memory usage without incurring extra execution time overheads. Our proposal is applicable in any ILP system.