数据挖掘：基于规则的分类器Rule-Based Classifi

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Rule-Based Classifier

Classify records by using a collection of “if…then…” rules
Rule: (Condition) → y

• where

  • Condition is a conjunctions of attributes

  • y is the class label

  • LHS: rule antecedent or condition

  • RHS: rule consequent

  • Examples of classification rules:

    (Blood Type=Warm) ∧ (Lay Eggs=Yes) → Birds

    (Taxable Income < 50K) ∧ (Refund=Yes) → Evade=No

A rule r covers an instance x if the attributes of the instance satisfy the condition of the rule.

Rule Coverage and Accuracy

Coverage of a rule: Fraction of records that satisfy the antecedent of a rule.

Accuracy of a rule: Fraction of records that satisfy both the antecedent and consequent of a rule.

Characteristics of Rule-Based Classifier

Mutually exclusive rules

• Classifier contains mutually exclusive rules if the rules are independent of each other

Exhaustive rules

• Every record is covered by at most one rule

• Classifier has exhaustive coverage if it accounts for every possible combination of attribute values

• Each record is covered by at least one rule

Rules are mutually exclusive and exhaustive
Rule set contains as much information as the tree

Effect of Rule Simplification

Rules are no longer mutually exclusive

• A record may trigger more than one rule
  • Ordered rule set - dependent on the importance
  • Unordered rule set – use voting schemes

Rules are no longer exhaustive

• A record may not trigger any rules
  • Use a default class

Ordered Rule Set

Rules are rank ordered according to their priority

• An ordered rule set is known as a decision list

When a test record is presented to the classifier

• It is assigned to the class label of the highest ranked rule it has
  triggered
• If none of the rules fired, it is assigned to the default class

Rule Ordering Schemes

Rule-based ordering

• Individual rules are ranked based on their quality

Class-based ordering

• Rules that belong to the same class appear together

Building Classification Rules

Direct Method

• Extract rules directly from data

• e.g.: RIPPER, CN2, Holte’s 1R

Indirect Method

• Extract rules from other classification models (e.g. decision trees, neural networks, etc).

• e.g: C4.5rules

Direct Method: Sequential Covering

1. Start from an empty rule
2. Grow a rule using the Learn-One-Rule function
3. Remove training records covered by the rule
4. Repeat Step (2) and (3) until stopping criterion is met

Aspects of Sequential Covering

• Rule Growing
• Instance Elimination
• Rule Evaluation
• Stopping Criterion
• Rule Pruning

Rule Growing (Examples)

CN2 Algorithm:

• Start from an empty conjunct: {}
• Add conjuncts that minimizes the entropy measure: {A}, {A,B},…
• Determine the rule consequent by taking majority class of instances
  covered by the rule

RIPPER Algorithm:

• Start from an empty rule: {} => class
• Add conjuncts that maximizes FOIL’s information gain measure:
  • R0: {} => class (initial rule)
  • R1: {A} => class (rule after adding conjunct)
  • 
  • where t: number of positive instances covered by both and
    : number of positive instances covered by
    : number of negative instances covered by
    : number of positive instances covered by
    : number of negative instances covered by

Instance Elimination

Why do we need to eliminate instances?

• Otherwise, the next rule is
  identical to previous rule

Why do we remove positive instances?

• Ensure that the next rule is different

Why do we remove negative instances?

• Prevent underestimating accuracy of rule

Stopping Criterion and Rule Pruning

Stopping criterion

• Compute the gain
• If gain is not significant, discard the new rule

Rule Pruning

• Similar to post-pruning of decision trees
• Reduced Error Pruning:
  • Remove one of the conjuncts in the rule
  • Compare error rate on validation set before and after pruning
  • If error improves, prune the conjunct

Summary of Direct Method

• Grow a single rule
• Remove Instances from rule
• Prune the rule (if necessary)
• Add rule to Current Rule Set
• Repeat

Indirect Methods C4.5 rules

• consider an alternative rule r’: A’ → y where A’ is obtained by removing one of the conjuncts in A
• Compare the pessimistic error rate for r against all r’s
• Prune if one of the r’s has lower pessimistic error rate
• Repeat until we can no longer improve generalization error

Instead of ordering the rules, order subsets of rules (class ordering)

• Each subset is a collection of rules with the same rule consequent (class)
• Compute description length of each subset
  • Description length = L(error) + g L(model) (Similar with decision tree)
  • g is a parameter that takes into account the presence of redundant attributes in a rule set (default value = 0.5)

Advantages of Rule-Based Classifiers

• As highly expressive as decision trees
• Easy to interpret
• Easy to generate
• Can classify new instances rapidly
• Performance comparable to decision trees