On the minimum number of logical clauses inferred from examples

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The paper is devoted to the problem of inductive inference (learning), where examples are classified as positive or negative. The issue is to determine a Boolean expression which classifies all the positive and negative examples correctly. The objective of the paper is to determine a lower bound on the number of clauses in the conjunctive normal form (CNF) or in the disjunctive normal form (DNF) which are needed to correctly classify a given set of examples. In addition, efficient approaches are derived which can effectively partition the input data into smaller groups before processing by a learning algorithm. In this way, large learning problems can be solved more efficiently. A sufficient and necessary condition of existence of a CNF clause which accepts all the given positive examples and rejects two given negative examples is stated (in Theorem 2). Theorem 2 motivates the construction of a graph, called the rejectability graph (R-graph). Nodes of the R-graph correspond to negative examples, an edge connects two negative examples if there is a clause which rejects both negative examples and accepts all positive examples. The R-graph provides the means for establishing a lower bound on the number of CNF (or DNF) clauses which can be inferred from positive and negative examples. A theorem states a lower bound (the minimum clique cover) on the minimum number of clauses required to reject all the negative examples in \(E^{-}\), while accepting all the positive examples in \(E^{+}\). The R-graph also provides an effective way for partitioning the original data and, thus, solve large scale learning problems. Furthermore, the rejectability graph suggests a time efficient approach for decomposing the original problem into a sequence of smaller problems and still infer a compact Boolean expression from the partial solutions of the smaller problems. Two learning algorithms are discussed. The first is a greedy approach based on a branch-and-bound algorithm (developed by Triantaphyllou). The second approach is based on formulating a satisfiability problem and then solving it by an interior point method. A report on computational experiments is given in the paper.











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