Approximate Match of Rules Using Backpropagation Neural Networks

This paper presents a method for approximate match of first-order rules with unseen data. The method is useful especially in case of a multi-class problem or a noisy domain where unseen data are often not covered by the rules. Our method employs the Backpropagation Neural Network for the approximation. To build the network, we propose a technique for generating features from the rules to be used as inputs to the network. Our method has been evaluated on four domains of first-order learning problems. The experimental results show improvements of our method over the use of the original rules. We also applied our method to approximate match of propositional rules converted from an unpruned decision tree. In this case, our method can be thought of as soft-pruning of the decision tree. The results on multi-class learning domains in the UCI repository of machine learning databases show that our method performs better than standard C4.5's pruned and unpruned trees.