Finding patterns with rules

Machine learning algorithms are now synonymous with finding patterns in data but not all patterns are suitable for statistics based data-driven techniques, for example when these patterns don't have explicitly labelled targets to learn from. In some cases, these patterns can be expressed precisely as a rule. Reasoning is the process of matching rule-based patterns or verifying that they don't exist in a graph. Because these patterns are found with deductive logic they can be found more efficiently and interpreted more easily than Machine Learning patterns which are induced from the data. This article will introduce some common patterns and how you can express them in the rule language, Datalog, using RDFox, a knowledge graph and semantic reasoning engine developed by Oxford Semantic Technologies.