881,715 research outputs found
Software defect prediction based on association rule classification.
In software defect prediction, predictive models are estimated based on various code attributes to assess the likelihood of software modules containing errors. Many classification methods have been suggested to accomplish this task. However, association based classification methods have not been investigated so far in this context. This paper assesses the use of such a classification method, CBA2, and compares it to other rule based classification methods. Furthermore, we investigate whether rule sets generated on data from one software project can be used to predict defective software modules in other, similar software projects. It is found that applying the CBA2 algorithm results in both accurate and comprehensible rule sets.Software defect prediction; Association rule classification; CBA2; AUC;
An artificial immune system for fuzzy-rule induction in data mining
This work proposes a classification-rule discovery algorithm integrating artificial immune systems and fuzzy systems. The algorithm consists of two parts: a sequential covering procedure and a rule evolution procedure. Each antibody (candidate solution) corresponds to a classification rule. The classification of new examples (antigens) considers not only the fitness of a fuzzy rule based on the entire training set, but also the affinity between the rule and the new example. This affinity must be greater than a threshold in order for the fuzzy rule to be activated, and it is proposed an adaptive procedure for computing this threshold for each rule. This paper reports results for the proposed algorithm in several data sets. Results are analyzed with respect to both predictive accuracy and rule set simplicity, and are compared with C4.5rules, a very popular data mining algorithm
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
Association Rule Based Classification
In this thesis, we focused on the construction of classification models based on association rules. Although association rules have been predominantly used for data exploration and description, the interest in using them for prediction has rapidly increased in the data mining community. In order to mine only rules that can be used for classification, we modified the well known association rule mining algorithm Apriori to handle user-defined input constraints. We considered constraints that require the presence/absence of particular items, or that limit the number of items, in the antecedents and/or the consequents of the rules. We developed a characterization of those itemsets that will potentially form rules that satisfy the given constraints. This characterization allows us to prune during itemset construction itemsets such that neither they nor any of their supersets will form valid rules. This improves the time performance of itemset construction. Using this characterization, we implemented a classification system based on association rules and compared the performance of several model construction methods, including CBA, and several model deployment modes to make predictions. Although the data mining community has dealt only with the classification of single-valued attributes, there are several domains in which the classification target is set-valued. Hence, we enhanced our classification system with a novel approach to handle the prediction of set-valued class attributes. Since the traditional classification accuracy measure is inappropriate in this context, we developed an evaluation method for set-valued classification based on the E-Measure. Furthermore, we enhanced our algorithm by not relying on the typical support/confidence framework, and instead mining for the best possible rules above a user-defined minimum confidence and within a desired range for the number of rules. This avoids long mining times that might produce large collections of rules with low predictive power. For this purpose, we developed a heuristic function to determine an initial minimum support and then adjusted it using a binary search strategy until a number of rules within the given range was obtained. We implemented all of our techniques described above in WEKA, an open source suite of machine learning algorithms. We used several datasets from the UCI Machine Learning Repository to test and evaluate our techniques
Random Prism: An Alternative to Random Forests.
Ensemble learning techniques generate multiple classifiers, so called base classifiers, whose combined classification results are used in order to increase the overall classification accuracy. In most ensemble classifiers the base classifiers are based on the Top Down Induction of Decision Trees (TDIDT) approach. However, an alternative approach for the induction of rule based classifiers is the Prism family of algorithms. Prism algorithms produce modular classification rules that do not necessarily fit into a decision tree structure. Prism classification rulesets achieve a comparable and sometimes higher classification accuracy compared with decision tree classifiers, if the data is noisy and large. Yet Prism still suffers from overfitting on noisy and large datasets. In practice ensemble techniques tend to reduce the overfitting, however there exists no ensemble learner for modular classification rule inducers such as the Prism family of algorithms. This article describes the first development of an ensemble learner based on the Prism family of algorithms in order to enhance Prismâs classification accuracy by reducing overfitting
Using a unified measure function for heuristics, discretization, and rule quality evaluation in Ant-Miner
Ant-Miner is a classification rule discovery algorithm that is based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) meta-heuristic. cAnt-Miner is the extended version of the algorithm that handles continuous attributes on-the-fly during the rule construction process, while ?Ant-Miner is an extension of the algorithm that selects the rule class prior to its construction, and utilizes multiple pheromone types, one for each permitted rule class. In this paper, we combine these two algorithms to derive a new approach for learning classification rules using ACO. The proposed approach is based on using the measure function for 1) computing the heuristics for rule term selection, 2) a criteria for discretizing continuous attributes, and 3) evaluating the quality of the constructed rule for pheromone update as well. We explore the effect of using different measure functions for on the output model in terms of predictive accuracy and model size. Empirical evaluations found that hypothesis of different functions produce different results are acceptable according to Friedmanâs statistical test
- âŠ