The outer impartation information content of rules and rule sets

Abstract

The appraisement of rules and rule sets is very important in data mining. The information content of rules is discussed in this paper and is categorized into inner mutual information and outer impartation information. We put forward the viewpoint that the outer impartation information content of rules and rule sets can be represented by relations from input universe to output universe. Then, the interaction of rules in a rule set can be represented by the union and intersection of binary relations expediently. Based on the entropy of relations, the outer impartation information content of rules and rule sets are well measured. Compared with the methods which appraise rule sets by their overall performance (accuracy, error rate) on the given test data sets, the outer impartation information content of rule sets is more objective and convenient because of the absence of test data sets. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.