AutoMode: Relational Learning With Less Black Magic

Relational databases are valuable resources for learning novel and interesting relations and concepts. Relational learning algorithms learn the Datalog definition of new relations in terms of the existing relations in the database. In order to constraint the search through the large space of candidate definitions, users must tune the algorithm by specifying a language bias. Unfortunately, specifying the language bias is done via trial and error and is guided by the expert’s intuitions. Hence, it normally takes a great deal of time and effort to effectively use these algorithms. In particular, it is hard to find a user that knows computer science concepts, such as database schema, and has a reasonable intuition about the target relation in special domains, such as biology. We propose AutoMode, a system that leverages information in the schema and content of the database to automatically induce the language bias used by popular relational learning systems. We show that AutoMode delivers the same accuracy as using manually-written language bias by imposing only a slight overhead on the running time of the learning algorithm.