Learning ontology-Aware classifiers

Many practical applications of machine learning in data-driven scientific discovery commonly call for the exploration of data from multiple points of view that correspond to explicitly specified ontologies. This paper formalizes a class of problems of learning from ontology and data, and explores the design space of learning classifiers from attribute value taxonomies (AVTs) and data. We introduce the notion of AVT-extended data sources and partially specified data. We propose a general framework for learning classifiers from such data sources. Two instantiations of this framework, AVT-based Decision Tree classifier and AVT-based Naïve Bayes classifier are presented. Experimental results show that the resulting algorithms are able to learn robust high accuracy classifiers with substantially more compact representations than those obtained by standard learners.