Attribute Generation Based on Association Rules

A decision tree is considered to be appropriate (1) if the tree can classify the unseen data accurately, and (2) if the size of the tree is small. One of the approaches to induce such a good decision tree is to add new attributes and their values to enhance the expressiveness of the training data at the data pre-processing stage. There are many existing methods for attribute extraction and construction, but constructing new attributes is still an art. These methods are very time consuming, and some of them need a priori knowledge of the data domain. They are not suitable for data mining dealing with large volumes of data. We propose a novel approach that the knowledge on attributes relevant to the class is extracted as association rules from the training data. The new attributes and the values are generated from the association rules among the originally given attributes. We elaborate on the method and investigate its feature. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through some experiments. Received 6 December 1999 / Revised 28 October 2000 / Accepted in revised form 9 March 2001