Learning answer set programs with aggregates via sampling and genetic programming

Abstract The goal of inductive logic programming is to learn a logic program that models the examples provided as input. The search space of the possible programs is constrained by a language bias, which defines the atoms and literals allowed in rules. Answer set programming is a powerful formalism to represent complex combinatorial domains, also thanks to syntactic constructs such as aggregates. However, learning answer set programs from data is challenging, and often existing tools do not support the specification of aggregates in the language bias. In this paper, we introduce GENTIANS, a tool based on a genetic algorithm to learn answer set programs possibly with aggregates, arithmetic, and comparison operators, from examples. Empirical results, also against an existing solver, show that GENTIANS is able to provide accurate solutions even when the search space contains millions of clauses. Additionally, experiments on noisy datasets show the effectiveness of our approach.