Induction as a Search Procedure

This chapter introduces Inductive Logic Programming from the perspective of search algorithms in Computer Science. It first briefly considers the Version Spaces approach to induction, and then focuses on Inductive Logic Programming: from its formal definition and main techniques and strategies, to priors used to restrict the search space and optimized sequential, parallel, and stochastic algorithms. The authors hope that this presentation of the theory and applications of Inductive Logic Programming will help the reader understand the theoretical underpinnings of inductive reasoning, and also provide a helpful overview of the State-of-theArt in the domain.