Abstract.Learning from interpretation transition (LFIT) automatically constructs a model of the dynamics of a system from the observation of its state transitions. So far, the systems that LFIT handles are restricted to synchronous deterministic dynamics, i.e., all variables update their values at the same time and, for each state of the system, there is only one possible next state. However, other dynamics exist in the field of logical modeling, in particular the asynchronous semantics which is widely used to model biological systems. In this paper, we focus on a method that learns the dynamics of the system independently of its semantics. For this purpose, we propose a modeling of multi-valued systems as logic programs in which a rule represents what can occurs rather than what will occurs. This modeling allows us to represent nondeterminism and to propose an extension of LFIT in the form of a semantics free algorithm to learn from discrete multi-valued transitions, regardless of their update schemes. We show through theoretical results that synchronous, asynchronous and general semantics are all captured by this method. Practical evaluation is performed on randomly generated systems and benchmarks from biological literature to study the scalability of this new algorithm regarding the three aforementioned semantics.Keywords: Dynamical semantics, learning from interpretation transition, dynamical systems, Inductive Logic Programming
IntroductionLearning the dynamics of systems with many interactive components becomes more and more important due to many applications, e.g., multi-agent systems, robotics and bioinformatics. Knowledge of a system dynamics can be used by agents and robots for planning and scheduling. In bioinformatics, learning the dynamics of biological systems can correspond to the identification of the influence of genes and can help to understand their interactions. While building a model, the choice of a relevant semantics associated to the studied system represents a major issue with regard to the kind of dynamical properties to analyze. The differences and common features of different semantics w.r.t. properties of interest (attractors, oscillators, etc.) constitutes an area of research per itself, especially in the field of Boolean networks. In [8], the author exhibits the translation from Boolean networks into logic programs and discusses the point attractors in both synchronous and asynchronous semantics. In [6], A. Garg et al. address the differences and complementarity of synchronous and asynchronous semantics to model biological networks and identify attractors. The benefits of the synchronous model are to be computationally tractable, while classical state space exploration algorithms fail on asynchronous ones. For some applications, like the biological ones, asynchronous semantics is said to capture more realistic behaviors: at a given time, a single gene can change its expression level. This results in a potential combinatorial explosion of the number of reachable states. To illustr...