Towards Machine Learning of Predictive Models from Ecological Data

In a previous paper we described a machine learning approach which was used to automatically generate food-webs from national-scale agricultural data. The learned food-webs in the previous study consist of hundreds of ground facts representing trophic links between individual species. These species food-webs can be used to explain the structure and dynamics of particular eco-systems, however, they cannot be directly used as general predictive models. In this paper we describe the first steps towards this generalisation and present initial results on (i) learning general functional food-webs (i.e. trophic links between functional groups of species) and (ii) meta-interpretive learning (MIL) of general predictive rules (e.g. about the effect of agricultural management). Experimental results suggest that functional food-webs have at least the same levels of predictive accuracies as species food-webs despite being much more compact. In this paper we also present initial experiments where predicate invention and recursive rule learning in MIL are used to learn food-webs as well as predictive rules directly from data.