Logic and the Automatic Acquisition of Scientific Knowledge: An Application to Functional Genomics

This paper is a manifesto aimed at computer scientists interested in developing and applying scientific discovery methods. It argues that: science is experiencing an unprecedented “explosion” in the amount of available data; traditional data analysis methods cannot deal with this increased quantity of data; there is an urgent need to automate the process of refining scientific data into scientific knowledge; inductive logic programming (ILP) is a data analysis framework well suited for this task; and exciting new scientific discoveries can be achieved using ILP scientific discovery methods. We describe an example of using ILP to analyse a large and complex bioinformatic database that has produced unexpected and interesting scientific results in functional genomics. We then point a possible way forward to integrating machine learning with scientific databases to form intelligent databases.