Using rule extraction to improve the comprehensibility of predictive models.

Whereas newer machine learning techniques, like artifficial neural net-works and support vector machines, have shown superior performance in various benchmarking studies, the application of these techniques remains largely restricted to research environments. A more widespread adoption of these techniques is foiled by their lack of explanation capability which is required in some application areas, like medical diagnosis or credit scoring. To overcome this restriction, various algorithms have been proposed to extract a meaningful description of the underlying `blackbox' models. These algorithms' dual goal is to mimic the behavior of the black box as closely as possible while at the same time they have to ensure that the extracted description is maximally comprehensible. In this research report, we first develop a formal definition of`rule extraction and comment on the inherent trade-off between accuracy and comprehensibility. Afterwards, we develop a taxonomy by which rule extraction algorithms can be classiffied and discuss some criteria by which these algorithms can be evaluated. Finally, an in-depth review of the most important algorithms is given.This report is concluded by pointing out some general shortcomings of existing techniques and opportunities for future research.Models; Model; Algorithms; Criteria; Opportunities; Research; Learning; Neural networks; Networks; Performance; Benchmarking; Studies; Area; Credit; Credit scoring; Behavior; Time;

Rule-Extraction Methods From Feedforward Neural Networks: A Systematic Literature Review

Motivated by the interpretability question in ML models as a crucial element for the successful deployment of AI systems, this paper focuses on rule extraction as a means for neural networks interpretability. Through a systematic literature review, different approaches for extracting rules from feedforward neural networks, an important block in deep learning models, are identified and explored. The findings reveal a range of methods developed for over two decades, mostly suitable for shallow neural networks, with recent developments to meet deep learning models' challenges. Rules offer a transparent and intuitive means of explaining neural networks, making this study a comprehensive introduction for researchers interested in the field. While the study specifically addresses feedforward networks with supervised learning and crisp rules, future work can extend to other network types, machine learning methods, and fuzzy rule extraction

A New Data Mining Scheme Using Artificial Neural Networks

Classification is one of the data mining problems receiving enormous attention in the database community. Although artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been successfully applied in a wide range of machine learning applications, they are however often regarded as black boxes, i.e., their predictions cannot be explained. To enhance the explanation of ANNs, a novel algorithm to extract symbolic rules from ANNs has been proposed in this paper. ANN methods have not been effectively utilized for data mining tasks because how the classifications were made is not explicitly stated as symbolic rules that are suitable for verification or interpretation by human experts. With the proposed approach, concise symbolic rules with high accuracy, that are easily explainable, can be extracted from the trained ANNs. Extracted rules are comparable with other methods in terms of number of rules, average number of conditions for a rule, and the accuracy. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is clearly demonstrated by the experimental results on a set of benchmark data mining classification problems

Knowledge Extraction from Survey Data using Neural Networks

Surveys are an important tool for researchers. Survey attributes are typically discrete data measured on a Likert scale. Collected responses from the survey contain an enormous amount of data. It is increasingly important to develop powerful means for clustering such data and knowledge extraction that could help in decision-making. The process of clustering becomes complex if the number of survey attributes is large. Another major issue in Likert-Scale data is the uniqueness of tuples. A large number of unique tuples may result in a large number of patterns and that may increase the complexity of the knowledge extraction process. Also, the outcome from the knowledge extraction process may not be satisfactory. The main focus of this research is to propose a method to solve the clustering problem of Likert-scale survey data and to propose an efficient knowledge extraction methodology that can work even if the number of unique patterns is large. The proposed method uses an unsupervised neural network for clustering, and an extended version of the conjunctive rule extraction algorithm has been proposed to extract knowledge in the form of rules. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, it is applied to two sets of Likert scale survey data, and results show that the proposed method produces rule sets that are comprehensive and concise without affecting the accuracy of the classifier