A classification rule reduction algorithm based on significance domains

Many rule systems generated from decision trees (like CART, ID3, C4.5, etc.) or from direct counting frequency methods (like Apriori) are usually non-significant or even contradictory. Nevertheless, most papers on this subject demonstrate that important reductions can be made to generate rule sets by searching and removing redundancies and conflicts and simplifying the similarities between them. The objective of this paper is to present an algorithm (RBS: Reduction Based on Significance) for allocating a significance value to each rule in the system so that experts may select the rules that should be considered as preferable and understand the exact degree of correlation between the different rule attributes. Significance is calculated from the antecedent frequency and rule frequency parameters for each rule; if the first one is above the minimal level and rule frequency is in a critical interval, its significance ratio is computed by the algorithm. These critical boundaries are calculated by an incremental method and the rule space is divided according to them. The significance function is defined for these intervals. As with other methods of rule reduction, our approach can also be applied to rule sets generated from decision trees or frequency counting algorithms, in an independent way and after the rule set has been created. Three simulated data sets are used to carry out a computational experiment. Other standard data sets from UCI repository (UCI Machine Learning Repository) and two particular data sets with expert interpretation are used too, in order to obtain a greater consistency. The proposed method offers a more reduced and more easily understandable rule set than the original sets, and highlights the most significant attribute correlations quantifying their influence on consequent attribute. Copyright Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa 2014