A review of: “THE EFFICACY OF THE SYMBOLIC,VOLUME II: A SYSTEMS MODEL OF REPRESENTATION” (in French), by Norman Lacharité. University of Quebec,Montreal, 1987, 223 pp

Classification, a data mining technique, has widespread applications including medical diagnosis, targeted marketing, and others. Knowledge discovery from databases in the form of association rules is one of the important data mining tasks. An integrated approach, classification based on association rules, has drawn the attention of the data mining community over the last decade. While attention has been mainly focused on increasing classifier accuracies, not much efforts have been devoted towards building interpretable and less complex models. This paper discusses the development of a compact associative classification model using a hill-climbing approach and fuzzy sets. The proposed methodology builds the rule-base by selecting rules which contribute towards increasing training accuracy, thus balancing classification accuracy with the number of classification association rules. The results indicated that the proposed associative classification model can achieve competitive accuracies on benchmark datasets with continuous attributes and lend better interpretability, when compared with other rule-based systems.     

A greedy classification algorithm based on association rule

Classification and association rule discovery are important data mining tasks. Using association rule discovery to construct classification systems, also known as associative classification, is a promising approach. In this paper, a new associative classification technique, Ranked Multilabel Rule (RMR) algorithm is introduced, which generates rules with multiple labels. Rules derived by current associative classification algorithms overlap in their training objects, resulting in many redundant and useless rules. However, the proposed algorithm resolves the overlapping between rules in the classifier by generating rules that does not share training objects during the training phase, resulting in a more accurate classifier. Results obtained from experimenting on 20 binary, multi-class and multi-label data sets show that the proposed technique is able to produce classifiers that contain rules associated with multiple classes. Furthermore, the results reveal that removing overlapping of training objects between the derived rules produces highly competitive classifiers if compared with those extracted by decision trees and other associative classification techniques, with respect to error rate.     

消除规则冲突和冗余的关联分类方法研究

研究分析了现有关联规则分类算法,总结了一般关联规则分类存在的不足,提出了一个基于关联规则挖掘技术构造分类器的新方法。该方法解决了传统算法产生规则太多,分类模型难以理解的问题。     

CAR-Miner: An efficient algorithm for mining class-association rules

Building a high accuracy classifier for classification is a problem in real applications. One high accuracy classifier used for this purpose is based on association rules. In the past, some researches showed that classification based on association rules (or class-association rules – CARs) has higher accuracy than that of other rule-based methods such as ILA and C4.5. However, mining CARs consumes more time because it mines a complete rule set. Therefore, improving the execution time for mining CARs is one of the main problems with this method that needs to be solved. In this paper, we propose a new method for mining class-association rule. Firstly, we design a tree structure for the storage frequent itemsets of datasets. Some theorems for pruning nodes and computing information in the tree are developed after that, and then, based on the theorems, we propose an efficient algorithm for mining CARs. Experimental results show that our approach is more efficient than those used previously.     

Design of fuzzy expert system for microarray data classification using a novel Genetic Swarm Algorithm

Knowledge gained through classification of microarray gene expression data is increasingly important as they are useful for phenotype classification of diseases. Different from black box methods, fuzzy expert system can produce interpretable classifier with knowledge expressed in terms of if-then rules and membership function. This paper proposes a novel Genetic Swarm Algorithm (GSA) for obtaining near optimal rule set and membership function tuning. Advanced and problem specific genetic operators are proposed to improve the convergence of GSA and classification accuracy. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated using six gene expression data sets. From the simulation study it is found that the proposed approach generated a compact fuzzy system with high classification accuracy for all the data sets when compared with other approaches.     

Novel associative classifier based on dynamic adaptive PSO: Application to determining candidates for thoracic surgery

Association rule mining is a data mining technique for discovering useful and novel patterns or relationships from databases. These rules are simple to infer and intuitive and can be easily used for classification in any domain that requires explanation for and investigation into how the classification works. Examples of such areas are medicine, agriculture, education, etc. For such a system to find wide adoptability, it should give output that is correct and comprehensible. The amount of data has been growing very fast and so has the search space of these problems. So we need to change traditional methods. This paper discusses a rule mining classifier called DA-AC (dynamic adaptive-associative classifier) which is based on a Dynamic Particle Swarm Optimizer. Due to its seeding method, exemplar selection, adaptive parameters, dynamic reconstruction of regions and velocity update, it avoids premature convergence and provides a better value in every dimension. Quality evaluation is done both for individual rules as well as entire rulesets. Experiments were conducted over fifteen benchmark datasets to evaluate performance of proposed algorithm in comparison with six other state-of-the-art non associative classifiers and eight associative classifiers. Results demonstrate competitive performance of proposed DA-AC while considering predictive accuracy and number of mined patterns as parameters. The method was then applied to predict life expectancy of post operative thoracic surgery patients.     

Classification based on association rules: A lattice-based approach

Classification plays an important role in decision support systems. A lot of methods for mining classification rules have been developed in recent years, such as C4.5 and ILA. These methods are, however, based on heuristics and greedy approaches to generate rule sets that are either too general or too overfitting for a given dataset. They thus often yield high error ratios. Recently, a new method for classification from data mining, called the Classification Based on Associations (CBA), has been proposed for mining class-association rules (CARs). This method has more advantages than the heuristic and greedy methods in that the former could easily remove noise, and the accuracy is thus higher. It can additionally generate a rule set that is more complete than C4.5 and ILA. One of the weaknesses of mining CARs is that it consumes more time than C4.5 and ILA because it has to check its generated rule with the set of the other rules. We thus propose an efficient pruning approach to build a classifier quickly. Firstly, we design a lattice structure and propose an algorithm for fast mining CARs using this lattice. Secondly, we develop some theorems and propose an algorithm for pruning redundant rules quickly based on these theorems. Experimental results also show that the proposed approach is more efficient than those used previously.     

Neural-Based Learning Classifier Systems

UCS is a supervised learning classifier system that was introduced in 2003 for classification in data mining tasks. The representation of a rule in UCS as a univariate classification rule is straightforward for a human to understand. However, the system may require a large number of rules to cover the input space. Artificial neural networks (NNs), on the other hand, normally provide a more compact representation. However, it is not a straightforward task to understand the network. In this paper, we propose a novel way to incorporate NNs into UCS. The approach offers a good compromise between compactness, expressiveness, and accuracy. By using a simple artificial NN as the classifier's action, we obtain a more compact population size, better generalization, and the same or better accuracy while maintaining a reasonable level of expressiveness. We also apply negative correlation learning (NCL) during the training of the resultant NN ensemble. NCL is shown to improve the generalization of the ensemble.     

Constrained dynamic rule induction learning

One of the known classification approaches in data mining is rule induction (RI). RI algorithms such as PRISM usually produce If-Then classifiers, which have a comparable predictive performance to other traditional classification approaches such as decision trees and associative classification. Hence, these classifiers are favourable for carrying out decisions by users and therefore they can be utilised as decision making tools. Nevertheless, RI methods, including PRISM and its successors, suffer from a number of drawbacks primarily the large number of rules derived. This can be a burden especially when the input data is largely dimensional. Therefore, pruning unnecessary rules becomes essential for the success of this type of classifiers. This article proposes a new RI algorithm that reduces the search space for candidate rules by early pruning any irrelevant items during the process of building the classifier. Whenever a rule is generated, our algorithm updates the candidate items frequency to reflect the discarded data examples associated with the rules derived. This makes items frequency dynamic rather static and ensures that irrelevant rules are deleted in preliminary stages when they don't hold enough data representation. The major benefit will be a concise set of decision making rules that are easy to understand and controlled by the decision maker. The proposed algorithm has been implemented in WEKA (Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis) environment and hence it can now be utilised by different types of users such as managers, researchers, students and others. Experimental results using real data from the security domain as well as sixteen classification datasets from University of California Irvine (UCI) repository reveal that the proposed algorithm is competitive in regards to classification accuracy when compared to known RI algorithms. Moreover, the classifiers produced by our algorithm are smaller in size which increase their possible use in practical applications.     

A parsimony fuzzy rule-based classifier using axiomatic fuzzy set theory and support vector machines

This paper proposes a classification method that is based on easily interpretable fuzzy rules and fully capitalizes on the two key technologies, namely pruning the outliers in the training data by SVMs (support vector machines), i.e., eliminating the influence of outliers on the learning process; finding a fuzzy set with sound linguistic interpretation to describe each class based on AFS (axiomatic fuzzy set) theory. Compared with other fuzzy rule-based methods, the proposed models are usually more compact and easily understandable for the users since each class is described by much fewer rules. The proposed method also comes with two other advantages, namely, each rule obtained from the proposed algorithm is simply a conjunction of some linguistic terms, there are no parameters that are required to be tuned. The proposed classification method is compared with the previously published fuzzy rule-based classifiers by testing them on 16 UCI data sets. The results show that the fuzzy rule-based classifier presented in this paper, offers a compact, understandable and accurate classification scheme. A balance is achieved between the interpretability and the accuracy.     

Intrusion detection by integrating boosting genetic fuzzy classifier and data mining criteria for rule pre-screening

The purpose of the work described in this paper is to provide an intelligent intrusion detection system (IIDS) that uses two of the most popular data mining tasks, namely classification and association rules mining together for predicting different behaviors in networked computers. To achieve this, we propose a method based on iterative rule learning using a fuzzy rule-based genetic classifier. Our approach is mainly composed of two phases. First, a large number of candidate rules are generated for each class using fuzzy association rules mining, and they are pre-screened using two rule evaluation criteria in order to reduce the fuzzy rule search space. Candidate rules obtained after pre-screening are used in genetic fuzzy classifier to generate rules for the classes specified in IIDS: namely Normal, PRB-probe, DOS-denial of service, U2R-user to root and R2L-remote to local. During the next stage, boosting genetic algorithm is employed for each class to find its fuzzy rules required to classify data each time a fuzzy rule is extracted and included in the system. Boosting mechanism evaluates the weight of each data item to help the rule extraction mechanism focus more on data having relatively more weight, i.e., uncovered less by the rules extracted until the current iteration. Each extracted fuzzy rule is assigned a weight. Weighted fuzzy rules in each class are aggregated to find the vote of each class label for each data item.     

基于支持度和增比率的改进关联分类算法

关联分类是一项重要的分类技术,目前普遍采用基于支持度和置信度的关联分类模式。但是,用支持度度量项集的分类能力过于简单,且置信度不能度量项集与类的相关性,所以利用支持度和置信度容易产生质量不好的规则。提出改进的关联分类算法—ACSER。ACSER不仅考虑项集到本类的支持度,也考虑项集到补类的支持度。首先,提取频繁增比模式作为分类候选规则集;其次,利用置信度和增比率度量规则的强度,按照其强度进行排序和剪枝;最后,选择k条最优的规则进行预测。在16个UCI数据集上的实验结果表明,改进的分类算法ACSER与传统的分类算法相比有更高的分类准确率。     

Mining associative classification rules with stock trading data – A GA-based method

Associative classifiers are a classification system based on associative classification rules. Although associative classification is more accurate than a traditional classification approach, it cannot handle numerical data and its relationships. Therefore, an ongoing research problem is how to build associative classifiers from numerical data. In this work, we focus on stock trading data with many numerical technical indicators, and the classification problem is finding sell and buy signals from the technical indicators. This study proposes a GA-based algorithm used to build an associative classifier that can discover trading rules from these numerical indicators. The experiment results show that the proposed approach is an effective classification technique with high prediction accuracy and is highly competitive when compared with the data distribution method.     

一个最优分类关联规则算法

分类和关联规则发现是数据挖掘中的两个重要领域。使用关联规则算法挖掘分类规则被叫做分类关联规则算法,是一个有较好前景的方法。本文提出了一个最优分类关联规则算法——OCARA。该算法使用最优关联规则挖掘算法挖掘分类规则,并对最优规则集排序,从而获得一个分类精度较高的分类器。将OCARA与传统分类算法C4.5和一般分类关联规则算法CBA、RMR在8个UCI数据集上进行实验比较,结果显示OCARA具有更好的性能,证明OCARA是一个有效的分类关联规则挖掘算法。     

基于混合策略的关联分类方法

关联分类中现有的显式学习方法无法解决small disjunction问题,而Lazy方法分类效率低。针对这两类方法存在的问题,提出了一种基于混合策略的关联分类方法。具体算法为:先判断待分类样本是否满足显式学习模式的分类器特征;然后把满足分类器特征的待分类样本用显式模式进行分类,把不满足分类器特征的待分类样本用Lazy模式来预测;最后结合两类方法的分类结果得到最终的分类结果。实验比较了该方法与传统的关联分类方法,结果表明,该方法在分类准确率和执行效率方面均达到了更好的效果。     

An adaptive rule-based classifier for mining big biological data

In this paper, we introduce a new adaptive rule-based classifier for multi-class classification of biological data, where several problems of classifying biological data are addressed: overfitting, noisy instances and class-imbalance data. It is well known that rules are interesting way for representing data in a human interpretable way. The proposed rule-based classifier combines the random subspace and boosting approaches with ensemble of decision trees to construct a set of classification rules without involving global optimisation. The classifier considers random subspace approach to avoid overfitting, boosting approach for classifying noisy instances and ensemble of decision trees to deal with class-imbalance problem. The classifier uses two popular classification techniques: decision tree and k-nearest-neighbor algorithms. Decision trees are used for evolving classification rules from the training data, while k-nearest-neighbor is used for analysing the misclassified instances and removing vagueness between the contradictory rules. It considers a series of k iterations to develop a set of classification rules from the training data and pays more attention to the misclassified instances in the next iteration by giving it a boosting flavour. This paper particularly focuses to come up with an optimal ensemble classifier that will help for improving the prediction accuracy of DNA variant identification and classification task. The performance of proposed classifier is tested with compared to well-approved existing machine learning and data mining algorithms on genomic data (148 Exome data sets) of Brugada syndrome and 10 real benchmark life sciences data sets from the UCI (University of California, Irvine) machine learning repository. The experimental results indicate that the proposed classifier has exemplary classification accuracy on different types of biological data. Overall, the proposed classifier offers good prediction accuracy to new DNA variants classification where noisy and misclassified variants are optimised to increase test performance.     

一种基于关联分类的增量更新算法

针对现有关联分类技术的不足,提出了一种适用于关联分类的增量更新算法IUAC。该算法是基于频繁模式树挖掘和更新关联规则的,并使用一种树形结构来存储最终用于分类的关联规则。同时,增加了对分类规则的约束条件,进一步控制了用于分类的关联规则的数量。最后,对算法整体进行了分析和讨论。     

基于信息增益的中文文本关联分类

关联分类是一种通过挖掘训练集中的关联规则,并利用这些规则预测新数据类属性的分类技术。最近的研究表明,关联分类取得了比传统的分类方法如C4.5更高的准确率。现有的基于支持度-置信度架构的关联分类方法仅仅是选择频繁文字构建分类规则,忽略了文字的分类有效性。本文提出一种新的ACIG算法,结合信息增益与FoilGain在中文文本中选择规则的文字,以提高文字的分类有效性。实验结果表明,ACIG算法比其他关联分类算法(CPAR)有更高的准确率。     

基于掩码分段匹配的否定选择数据分类

根据免疫否定选择原理,设计了基于掩码分段匹配的否定选择分类器,用于实现规则匹配分类。给出了适用于免疫优化的分类规则编码及分类信息分的评价标准,通过免疫进化对其进行群体优化以生成更为简洁、便于理解的数据规则集。该方法使得免疫优化的各种优良特性在数据分类中得到充分的运用,避免了传统分类算法缺乏全局优化能力的缺点,提高了对样本的识别能力。实验结果表明,这种免疫分类器及优化方法是一种有效、可行的分类器设计方案,提高了数据分类的准确性。     

基于类频繁模式树的关联分类

提出一种新的基于类频繁模式树的关联分类算法CFPC(Class FP-tree based Classifier).该方法基于FP-tree实现,无需生成庞大的候选项目集;依据记录的分类属性进行指导性划分,并使用类支持度进行记录项的分类剪枝,生成类模式树,避免了小数据类别集上的强关联模式遗漏;挖掘出的规则形成分类器,用于类标号未知的记录的区分.试验结果表明CFPC的正确性和有效性.