A Simulated Annealing Meta-heuristic for Concept Learning in Description Logics

Ontologies - providing an explicit schema for underlying data - often serve as background knowledge for machine learning approaches. Similar to ILP methods, concept learning utilizes such ontologies to learn concept expressions from examples in a supervised manner. This learning process is usually cast as a search process through the space of ontologically valid concept expressions, guided by heuristics. Such heuristics usually try to balance explorative and exploitative behaviors of the learning algorithms. While exploration ensures a good coverage of the search space, exploitation focuses on those parts of the search space likely to contain accurate concept expressions. However, at their extreme ends, both paradigms are impractical: A totally random explorative approach will only find good solutions by chance, whereas a greedy but myopic, exploitative attempt might easily get trapped in local optima. To combine the advantages of both paradigms, different meta-heuristics have been proposed. In this paper, we examine the Simulated Annealing meta-heuristic and how it can be used to balance the exploration-exploitation trade-off in concept learning. In different experimental settings, we analyse how and where existing concept learning algorithms can benefit from the Simulated Annealing meta-heuristic.