Ontology-Driven Induction of Decision Trees at Multiple Levels of Abstraction

Zhang, Jun, Silvescu, Adrian and Honavar, Vasant (2002) Ontology-Driven Induction of Decision Trees at Multiple Levels of Abstraction. Technical Report ISU-CS-TR 02-13, Computer Science, Iowa State University.

Abstract

Ontology-Driven Induction of Decision Trees at Multiple Levels of Abstraction Ontology-Driven Decision Tree Jun Zhang, Adrian Silvescu, and Vasant Honavar} Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory Department of Computer Science Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 50011-1040 USA

Most learning algorithms for data-driven induction of pattern classifiers (e.g., the decision tree algorithm), typically represent input patterns at a single level of abstraction -- usually in the form of an ordered tuple of attribute values. However, in many applications of inductive learning -- e.g., scientific discovery, users often need to explore a data set at multiple levels of abstraction, and from different points of view. Each point of view corresponds to a set of ontological (and representational) commitments regarding the domain of interest. The choice of an ontology induces a set of representatios of the data and a set of transformations of the hypothesis space. This paper formalizes the problem of inductive learning using ontologies and data; describes an ontology-driven decision tree learning algorithm to learn classification rules at multiple levels of abstraction; and presents preliminary results to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.