Gene classification: Issues and challenges for relational learning

Abstract

We present ongoing research that applies statistical relational learning techniques, in particular, propositionalization, to the challenging and interesting real-world domain of functional gene classification of the Yeast genome Sachharomyces Cerevisiae. The main objective of this paper is to identify and describe the structural and statistical properties of this domain and examine how they conict with the as- sumptions of relational learning approaches. Such properties are, in fact, shared by many relational application domains and potential solutions will be of interest far beyond the par- ticular genetic application. We show in the last part some preliminary experimental results on potential approaches to overcome such limitations by extending the existing auto- mated feature construction strategies to accommodate the specific domain properties.