Towards a Logic-Based View of Some Approaches to Classification Tasks

Dubois, Didier; Prade, Henri

This paper is a plea for revisiting various existing approaches to the handling of data, for classification purposes, based on a set-theoretic view, such as version space learning, formal concept analysis, or analogical proportion-based inference, which rely on different paradigms and motivations and have been developed separately. The paper also exploits the notion of conditional object as a proper tool for modeling if-then rules. It also advocates possibility theory for handling uncertainty in such settings. It is a first, and preliminary, step towards a unified view of what these approaches contribute to machine learning.