Learning concept descriptions with typed evolutionary programming

Examples and concepts in traditional concept learning tasks are represented with the attribute-value language. While enabling efficient implementations, we argue that such propositional representation is inadequate when data is rich in structure. This paper describes STEPS, a strongly-typed evolutionary programming system designed to induce concepts from structured data. STEPS higher-order logic representation language enhances expressiveness, while the use of evolutionary computation dampens the effects of the corresponding explosion of the search space. Results on the PTE2 challenge, a major real-world knowledge discovery application from the molecular biology domain, demonstrate promise.