Elsevier

Knowledge-Based Systems

Volume 18, Issue 7, November 2005, Pages 321-326
Knowledge-Based Systems

A creative abduction approach to scientific and knowledge discovery

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2004.12.003Get rights and content

Abstract

In this paper we explore the range of applicability of abductive reasoning for knowledge discovery. In particular, we discuss a novel form of abduction, called creative abduction, where new knowledge is generated in the process of explaining observed events, and demonstrate its relevance to knowledge discovery. The main contribution of this paper is twofold: First, we show that creative abduction can be used to infer a disposition explaining local temporal regularities. In the presence of multiple correlated regularities, this form abduction may significantly unify a given corpus of knowledge, corresponding to theory formation in scientific discovery. Second, we present a weaker form of creative abduction that infers a goal (e.g. interest) from simple ‘condition-effect’ rules called ‘transitions’. If multiple transitions are correlated, the weaker form of creative abduction can be used to identify, e.g. clusters of Web users, as done in Web usage mining. We will focus on the formal underpinnings of this new form of abduction that seems readily applicable to a wide range of practical knowledge discovery problems.

Introduction

We take the notion of ‘knowledge discovery in databases’ (KDD) to mean methods that generate new, plausible, useful, and intelligible knowledge for observed events. Similar definitions can be found in the literature, differing mostly in emphasizing individual features of the produced knowledge [2], [17].

In this paper, we advocate an approach to knowledge discovery that is based on abductive reasoning, an inference scheme originally introduced by Peirce [10]. The standard formulation describes abduction as an inference to a hypothesis C that would explain the evidence E, given the law EC. This form of abduction became a prevalent reasoning mechanism in many fields of artificial intelligence such as diagnosis, natural language understanding, default reasoning, database updates, planning, and high-level vision [5], [7], [12], [13]. From a knowledge discovery point of view, however, the standard form of abduction is rather uninteresting since in principle, all the knowledge needed to explain the observations is already given in the problem formulation.

Schurz [15] observed that Peirce actually introduced two forms of abductive inference: the first one that he calls non-creative corresponds to the scheme mentioned above. The second form of abduction infers a disposition of certain objects that would explain a set of local temporal (empirical) regularities involving those objects. For instance, the hypothesis that a has the disposition of (electric) conductivity explains the local temporal regularity ‘whenever object a is subject to a voltage source, a conducts current’. Since the predicate denoting the disposition is not already part of the theory, he calls this form of reasoning creative abduction. In addition to the abduced disposition, a new rule is inferred expressing that the set of empirical regularities is ‘caused’ by the objects' disposition. In order to state a causal relationship, the hypothesized disposition is also required to unify a given corpus of knowledge, which means that the abduced disposition can explain a set of correlated regularities.

The creative form of abduction can be used to accomplish many kinds of knowledge discovery tasks. In this paper, we will explore two such tasks. The first one is scientific discovery where a disposition (or cause) is invented to explain multiple correlated empirical regularities. The second one employs a weaker form of creative abduction that is broadly applicable to KDD tasks, such as Web usage mining [3].

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, creative forms of abduction found in the literature are discussed. Section 3 is devoted to introducing disposition-creative abduction and its application to scientific discovery. In Section 4, goal-creative abduction, a weaker form of disposition-creative abduction, is introduced and its relevance to Web usage mining is demonstrated. Section 5 discusses related work, and Section 6 concludes the paper.

Section snippets

Related work

In this section, we offer a short primer on abductive reasoning, and discuss two forms of abduction found in the literature that can be called creative since some ‘new’ hypothesis is invented to explain observed events. There, a new hypothesis is a piece of knowledge that comes in two different syntactic forms:

  • Element-creative abduction. The hypothesis is a constant denoting an hitherto unknown object (element) of the domain. Element-creative abduction is a method for scientific discovery, i.e.

Creative abduction for scientific discovery

Schurz [15] argues that empirical regularities applying to some (at least one but not all) objects of a domain, called local temporal regularities (or simply empirical regularities), can be explained by hypothesizing an ‘intrinsic property’ or ‘disposition’ of those objects, and calls this form of inference ‘abduction to a disposition’. Then he shows that if the regularities are correlated, this form of abduction is able to significantly unify a given corpus of knowledge. In this case, the

Creative abduction for knowledge discovery

We will develop goal-creative abduction analogous to disposition-creative abduction. However, goal-creative abduction is weaker in the sense that it assumes ‘regularities’ of a quite simple and easily available format. As an example, we discuss Web usage mining based on records in a Web server log.

Discussion

We presented two forms of creative abduction that are intended to cover different enterprises within KDD. The first one is called disposition-creative abduction and can be applied to the task of theory formation in scientific discovery. Disposition-creative abduction is closely related to Reichenbach's principle of the common cause [14], i.e. whenever two events A and B are correlated statistically (or deterministic), then they must have a (temporally prior) common cause. The assumption of

Conclusion

In this paper, we advance creative abduction as a unifying framework for knowledge discovery. Variants of creative abduction subsume important discovery tasks such as theory formation and revision, data mining, and inductive concept learning. In particular, we focus on a form of creative abduction where a disposition or goal is hypothesized in order to explain observed regularities: disposition-creative and goal-creative abduction. Both of them produce knowledge that is new, plausible,

Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the Research Grant (1999–2003) for the Future Program (‘Mirai Kaitaku’) from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).

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