Mining class contrast functions by gene expression programming

Abstract

Finding functions whose accuracies change significantly between two classes is an interesting work. In this paper, this kind of functions is defined as class contrast functions. As Gene Expression Programming (GEP) can discover essential relations from data and express them mathematically, it is desirable to apply GEP to mining such class contrast functions from data. The main contributions of this paper include: (1) proposing a new data mining task - class contrast function mining, (2) designing a GEP based method to find class contrast functions, (3) presenting several strategies for finding multiple class contrast functions in data, (4) giving an extensive performance study on both synthetic and real world datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed methods are effective. Several class contrast functions are discovered from the real world datasets. Some potential works on class contrast function mining are discussed based on the experimental results. © 2009 Springer.