A Personal View of How Best to Apply ILP

The ancient Celts believed that there were three objects of intellect: the true, the beautiful, and the beneficial. Like all good ideas, ILP combines aspects all three of these objects. In this talk I focus on how to obtain the benefits of ILP. I describe applications of ILP to drug design, toxicology, protein function prediction, chemical pathway discovery, and automatic scientific discovery. The use of ILP enabled these problems to be computationally represented in a more compact and natural way than would be possible propositionally. ILP also helped domain understandable rules to be generated and significant scientific results have been obtained. The use of ILP came at a computational cost. However, non-technical reasons are probably the greatest barrier against the greater adoption of ILP. For example, it is difficulty explain the benefits of ILP to domain experts.