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