Knowledge acquisition from questionnaire data using simulated breeding and inductive learning methods

Marketing decision making tasks require the acquisition of efficient decision rules from noisy questionnaire data. Unlike popular learning-from-example methods, in such tasks, we must interpret the characteristics of the data without clear features of the data nor pre-determined evaluation criteria. The problem is how domain experts get simple, easy-to-understand, and accurate knowledge from noisy data.

This paper describes a novel method to acquire efficient decision rules from questionnaire data using both simulated breeding and inductive learning techniques. The basic ideas of the method are that simulated breeding is used to get the effective features from the questionnaire data and that inductive learning is used to acquire simple decision rules from the data. The simulated breeding is one of the Genetic Algorithm based techniques to subjectively or interactively evaluate the qualities of offspring generated by genetic operations.

The proposed method has been qualitatively and quantitatively validated by a case study on consumer product questionnaire data: the acquired rules are simpler than the results from the direct application of inductive learning; a domain expert admits that they are easy to understand; and they are at the same level on the accuracy compared with the other methods.

Furthermore, we address three variations of the basic interactive version of the method: (i) with semiautomated GA phases, (ii) with the relatively evaluation phase via AHP, and (iii) with an automated multiagent learning method.