Compressing probabilistic Prolog programs

ProbLog is a recently introduced probabilistic extension of Prolog (De Raedt, et al. in Proceedings of the 20th international joint conference on artificial intelligence, pp. 2468-2473, 2007). A ProbLog program defines a distribution over logic programs by specifying for each clause the probability that it belongs to a randomly sampled program, and these probabilities are mutually independent. The semantics of ProbLog is then defined by the success probability of a query in a randomly sampled program. This paper introduces the theory compression task for ProbLog, which consists of selecting that subset of clauses of a given ProbLog program that maximizes the likelihood w.r.t. a set of positive and negative examples. Experiments in the context of discovering links in real biological networks demonstrate the practical applicability of the approach.