Ants constructing rule-based classifiers.

Classifiers; Data; Data mining; Studies;

Ants Constructing Rule-Based Classifiers

Book series: Studies in Computational Intelligencestatus: publishe

TSE-IDS: A Two-Stage Classifier Ensemble for Intelligent Anomaly-based Intrusion Detection System

Intrusion detection systems (IDS) play a pivotal role in computer security by discovering and repealing malicious activities in computer networks. Anomaly-based IDS, in particular, rely on classification models trained using historical data to discover such malicious activities. In this paper, an improved IDS based on hybrid feature selection and two-level classifier ensembles is proposed. An hybrid feature selection technique comprising three methods, i.e. particle swarm optimization, ant colony algorithm, and genetic algorithm, is utilized to reduce the feature size of the training datasets (NSL-KDD and UNSW-NB15 are considered in this paper). Features are selected based on the classification performance of a reduced error pruning tree (REPT) classifier. Then, a two-level classifier ensembles based on two meta learners, i.e., rotation forest and bagging, is proposed. On the NSL-KDD dataset, the proposed classifier shows 85.8% accuracy, 86.8% sensitivity, and 88.0% detection rate, which remarkably outperform other classification techniques recently proposed in the literature. Results regarding the UNSW-NB15 dataset also improve the ones achieved by several state of the art techniques. Finally, to verify the results, a two-step statistical significance test is conducted. This is not usually considered by IDS research thus far and, therefore, adds value to the experimental results achieved by the proposed classifier

A new sequential covering strategy for inducing classification rules with ant colony algorithms

Ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms have been successfully applied to discover a list of classification rules. In general, these algorithms follow a sequential covering strategy, where a single rule is discovered at each iteration of the algorithm in order to build a list of rules. The sequential covering strategy has the drawback of not coping with the problem of rule interaction, i.e., the outcome of a rule affects the rules that can be discovered subsequently since the search space is modified due to the removal of examples covered by previous rules. This paper proposes a new sequential covering strategy for ACO classification algorithms to mitigate the problem of rule interaction, where the order of the rules is implicitly encoded as pheromone values and the search is guided by the quality of a candidate list of rules. Our experiments using 18 publicly available data sets show that the predictive accuracy obtained by a new ACO classification algorithm implementing the proposed sequential covering strategy is statistically significantly higher than the predictive accuracy of state-of-the-art rule induction classification algorithms

Learning Multi-Tree Classification Models with Ant Colony Optimization

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a meta-heuristic for solving combinatorial optimization problems, inspired by the behaviour of biological ant colonies. One of the successful applications of ACO is learning classification models (classifiers). A classifier encodes the relationships between the input attribute values and the values of a class attribute in a given set of labelled cases and it can be used to predict the class value of new unlabelled cases. Decision trees have been widely used as a type of classification model that represent comprehensible knowledge to the user. In this paper, we propose the use of ACO-based algorithms for learning an extended multi-tree classification model, which consists of multiple decision trees, one for each class value. Each class-based decision trees is responsible for discriminating between its class value and all other values available in the class domain. Our proposed algorithms are empirically evaluated against well-known decision trees induction algorithms, as well as the ACO-based Ant-Tree-Miner algorithm. The results show an overall improvement in predictive accuracy over 32 benchmark datasets. We also discuss how the new multi-tree models can provide the user with more understanding and knowledge-interpretability in a given domain

ADR-Miner: An Ant-based data reduction algorithm for classification

Classi cation is a central problem in the elds of data mining and machine learning. Using a training set of labeled instances, the task is to build a model (classi er) that can be used to predict the class of new unlabeled instances. Data preparation is crucial to the data mining process, and its focus is to improve the tness of the training data for the learning algorithms to produce more e ective classi ers. Two widely applied data preparation methods are feature selection and instance selection, which fall under the umbrella of data reduction. For my research I propose ADR-Miner, a novel data reduction algorithm that utilizes ant colony optimization (ACO). ADR-Miner is designed to perform instance selection to improve the predictive e ectiveness of the constructed classi cation models. Two versions of ADR-Miner are developed: a base version that uses a single classi cation algorithm during both training and testing, and an extended version which uses separate classi cation algorithms for each phase. The base version of the ADR-Miner algorithm is evaluated against 20 data sets using three classi cation algorithms, and the results are compared to a benchmark data reduction algorithm. The non-parametric Wilcoxon signed-ranks test will is employed to gauge the statistical signi cance of the results obtained. The extended version of ADR-Miner is evaluated against 37 data sets using pairings from fi ve classi cation algorithms and these results are benchmarked against the performance of the classi cation algorithms but without reduction applied as pre-processing. Keywords: Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Data Mining, Classi cation, Data Reduction

Adaptive Parameter Control Strategy for Ant-Miner Classification Algorithm

Pruning is the popular framework for preventing the dilemma of overfitting noisy data. This paper presents a new hybrid Ant-Miner classification algorithm and ant colony system (ACS), called ACS-AntMiner. A key aspect of this algorithm is the selection of an appropriate number of terms to be included in the classification rule. ACS-AntMiner introduces a new parameter called importance rate (IR) which is a pre-pruning criterion based on the probability (heuristic and pheromone) amount. This criterion is responsible for adding only the important terms to each rule, thus discarding noisy data. The ACS algorithm is designed to optimize the IR parameter during the learning process of the Ant-Miner algorithm. The performance of the proposed classifier is compared with related ant-mining classifiers, namely, Ant-Miner, CAnt-Miner, TACO-Miner, and Ant-Miner with a hybrid pruner across several datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed classifier significantly outperforms the other ant-mining classifiers

Investigating Evaluation Measures in Ant Colony Algorithms for Learning Decision Tree Classifiers

Ant-Tree-Miner is a decision tree induction algorithm that is based on the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) meta- heuristic. Ant-Tree-Miner-M is a recently introduced extension of Ant-Tree-Miner that learns multi-tree classification models. A multi-tree model consists of multiple decision trees, one for each class value, where each class-based decision tree is responsible for discriminating between its class value and all other values present in the class domain (one vs. all). In this paper, we investigate the use of 10 different classification quality evaluation measures in Ant-Tree-Miner-M, which are used for both candidate model evaluation and model pruning. Our experimental results, using 40 popular benchmark datasets, identify several quality functions that substantially improve on the simple Accuracy quality function that was previously used in Ant-Tree-Miner-M