Converting a naive Bayes model into a set of rules

Abstract

A knowledge representation based on the probability theory is currently the most popular way of handling uncertainty. However, rule based systems are still popular. Their advantage is that rules are usually more easy to interpret than probabilistic models. A conversion method would allow to exploit advantages of both techniques. In this paper an algorithm that converts Naive Bayes models into rule sets is proposed. Preliminary experimental results show that rules generated from Naive Bayes models are compact and accuracy of such rule-based classifiers are relatively high. © 2006 Springer.