The Alchemy Tutorial

Alchemy is a software tool designed for a wide range of users. Anyone with a need for a knowledge base with uncertainty will find Alchemy useful and this is the target audience of this tutorial. It assumes the reader has general knowledge of classical machine learning algorithms and tasks and is familiar with first-order and Markov logic and some probability theory. Markov logic serves as a general framework which can not only be used for the emerging field of statistical relational learning, but also can handle many classical machine learning tasks which many users are familiar with. Instead of addressing only certain domains or adding ad hoc features to deal with anomalies, Markov logic presents a language to handle machine learning problems intuitively and comprehensibly. With this in mind, this tutorial looks to serve two purposes: