On Cognitive Preferences and the Plausibility of Rule-based Models

It is conventional wisdom in machine learning and data mining that logical models such as rule sets are more interpretable than other models, and that among such rule-based models, simpler models are more interpretable than more complex ones. In this position paper, we question this latter assumption by focusing on one particular aspect of interpretability, namely the plausibility of models. Roughly speaking, we equate the plausibility of a model with the likeliness that a user accepts it as an explanation for a prediction. In particular, we argue that, all other things being equal, longer explanations may be more convincing than shorter ones, and that the predominant bias for shorter models, which is typically necessary for learning powerful discriminative models, may not be suitable when it comes to user acceptance of the learned models. To that end, we first recapitulate evidence for and against this postulate, and then report the results of an evaluation in a crowd-sourcing study based on about 3.000 judgments. The results do not reveal a strong preference for simple rules, whereas we can observe a weak preference for longer rules in some domains. We then relate these results to well-known cognitive biases such as the conjunction fallacy, the representative heuristic, or the recogition heuristic, and investigate their relation to rule length and plausibility.Comment: V4: Another rewrite of section on interpretability to clarify focus on plausibility and relation to interpretability, comprehensibility, and justifiabilit

Interval-valued fuzzy decision trees with optimal neighbourhood perimeter

This research proposes a new model for constructing decision trees using interval-valued fuzzy membership values. Most existing fuzzy decision trees do not consider the uncertainty associated with their membership values, however, precise values of fuzzy membership values are not always possible. In this paper, we represent fuzzy membership values as intervals to model uncertainty and employ the look-ahead based fuzzy decision tree induction method to construct decision trees. We also investigate the significance of different neighbourhood values and define a new parameter insensitive to specific data sets using fuzzy sets. Some examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach

ISIPTA'07: Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Imprecise Probability: Theories and Applications

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Fuzzy image segmentation considering surface characteristics and feature set selection strategy

The image segmentation performance of any clustering algorithm is sensitive to the features used and the types of object in an image, both of which compromise the overall generality of the algorithm. This paper proposes a novel fuzzy image segmentation considering surface characteristics and feature set selection strategy (FISFS) algorithm which addresses these issues. Features that are exploited when the initially segmented results from a clustering algorithm are subsequently merged include connectedness, object surface characteristics and the arbitrariness of the fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm for pixel location. A perceptual threshold is also integrated within the region merging strategy. Qualitative and quantitative results are presented, together with a full time-complexity analysis, to confirm the superior performance of FISFS compared with FCM, possibilistic c-means (PCM), and suppressed FCM (SFCM) clustering algorithms, for a wide range of disparate images