An incremental decision tree algorithm based on rough sets and its application in intrusion detection

As we know, learning in real world is interactive, incremental and dynamical in multiple dimensions, where new data could be appeared at anytime from anywhere and of any type. Therefore, incremental learning is of more and more importance in real world data mining scenarios. Decision trees, due to their characteristics, have been widely used for incremental learning. In this paper, we propose a novel incremental decision tree algorithm based on rough set theory. To improve the computation efficiency of our algorithm, when a new instance arrives, according to the given decision tree adaptation strategies, the algorithm will only modify some existing leaf node in the currently active decision tree or add a new leaf node to the tree, which can avoid the high time complexity of the traditional incremental methods for rebuilding decision trees too many times. Moreover, the rough set based attribute reduction method is used to filter out the redundant attributes from the original set of attributes. And we adopt the two basic notions of rough sets: significance of attributes and dependency of attributes, as the heuristic information for the selection of splitting attributes. Finally, we apply the proposed algorithm to intrusion detection. The experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm can provide competitive solutions to incremental learning.