An intelligent agent interacting with the real world will encounter individual people, courses, test results, drugs prescriptions, chairs, boxes, etc., and needs to reason about properties of these individuals and relations among them as well as cope with uncertainty. Uncertainty has been studied in probability theory and graphical models, and relations have been studied in logic, in particular in the predicate calculus and its extensions. This book examines the foundations of combining logic and probability into what are called relational probabilistic models. It introduces representations, inference, and learning techniques for probability, logic, and their combinations. The book focuses on two representations in detail: Markov logic networks, a relational extension of undirected graphical models and weighted first-order predicate calculus formula, and Problog, a probabilistic extension of logic programs that can also be viewed as a Turing-complete relational extension of Bayesian networks.
About the Author: Luc De Raedt is a full professor of computer science at the KU Leuven (Belgium), where he is director of the Lab for Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence, and where he also obtained his Ph.D. He is also a former professor of computer science of the Albert-Ludwigs University Freiburg (Germany) and chair of its lab for Natural Language Processsing and Machine Learning.
Luc De Raedt's research interests are in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data mining, as well as their applications. He is currently working on probabilistic logic learning (sometimes called statistical relational learning), which combines probabilistic reasoning methods with logical representations and machine learning, the integration of constraint programming with data mining and machine learning principles, the development of programming languages for machine learning, and analyzing graph and network data. He is also interested in applications of these methods to chemo- and bio-informatics, to natural language processing, vision, robotics, and action and activity learning. He was program (co)-chair of the 7th ECML Machine Learning (1994, Catania, Sicily), the 5th ILP (1995, Leuven, Belgium), the first ECMLPKDD (2001, Freiburg, Germany), the 22nd ICML Learning (2005, Bonn, Germany) and the 20th ECAI (2012, Montpellier, France). He is an area/action editor of TPLP, JMLR, MLJ, AIJ, and formerly of JAIR. He is also a member of the editorial boards of NGC, AI Communications, Informatica, DMKD, and the Journal of Applied Logic. He was an elected and founding member of the board of the International Machine Learning Society from 2004-2011. In 2005, he was elected as an ECCAI fellow and four of his students have won the ECCAI dissertation award for the best European dissertation in AI.
