4,830 research outputs found
Interpretable multiclass classification by MDL-based rule lists
Interpretable classifiers have recently witnessed an increase in attention
from the data mining community because they are inherently easier to understand
and explain than their more complex counterparts. Examples of interpretable
classification models include decision trees, rule sets, and rule lists.
Learning such models often involves optimizing hyperparameters, which typically
requires substantial amounts of data and may result in relatively large models.
In this paper, we consider the problem of learning compact yet accurate
probabilistic rule lists for multiclass classification. Specifically, we
propose a novel formalization based on probabilistic rule lists and the minimum
description length (MDL) principle. This results in virtually parameter-free
model selection that naturally allows to trade-off model complexity with
goodness of fit, by which overfitting and the need for hyperparameter tuning
are effectively avoided. Finally, we introduce the Classy algorithm, which
greedily finds rule lists according to the proposed criterion. We empirically
demonstrate that Classy selects small probabilistic rule lists that outperform
state-of-the-art classifiers when it comes to the combination of predictive
performance and interpretability. We show that Classy is insensitive to its
only parameter, i.e., the candidate set, and that compression on the training
set correlates with classification performance, validating our MDL-based
selection criterion
QCBA: Postoptimization of Quantitative Attributes in Classifiers based on Association Rules
The need to prediscretize numeric attributes before they can be used in
association rule learning is a source of inefficiencies in the resulting
classifier. This paper describes several new rule tuning steps aiming to
recover information lost in the discretization of numeric (quantitative)
attributes, and a new rule pruning strategy, which further reduces the size of
the classification models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed
methods on postoptimization of models generated by three state-of-the-art
association rule classification algorithms: Classification based on
Associations (Liu, 1998), Interpretable Decision Sets (Lakkaraju et al, 2016),
and Scalable Bayesian Rule Lists (Yang, 2017). Benchmarks on 22 datasets from
the UCI repository show that the postoptimized models are consistently smaller
-- typically by about 50% -- and have better classification performance on most
datasets
Learning Interpretable Rules for Multi-label Classification
Multi-label classification (MLC) is a supervised learning problem in which,
contrary to standard multiclass classification, an instance can be associated
with several class labels simultaneously. In this chapter, we advocate a
rule-based approach to multi-label classification. Rule learning algorithms are
often employed when one is not only interested in accurate predictions, but
also requires an interpretable theory that can be understood, analyzed, and
qualitatively evaluated by domain experts. Ideally, by revealing patterns and
regularities contained in the data, a rule-based theory yields new insights in
the application domain. Recently, several authors have started to investigate
how rule-based models can be used for modeling multi-label data. Discussing
this task in detail, we highlight some of the problems that make rule learning
considerably more challenging for MLC than for conventional classification.
While mainly focusing on our own previous work, we also provide a short
overview of related work in this area.Comment: Preprint version. To appear in: Explainable and Interpretable Models
in Computer Vision and Machine Learning. The Springer Series on Challenges in
Machine Learning. Springer (2018). See
http://www.ke.tu-darmstadt.de/bibtex/publications/show/3077 for further
informatio
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