A novel Boolean kernels family for categorical data

Abstract

Kernel based classifiers, such as SVM, are considered state-of-the-art algorithms and are widely used on many classification tasks. However, this kind of methods are hardly interpretable and for this reason they are often considered as black-box models. In this paper, we propose a new family of Boolean kernels for categorical data where features correspond to propositional formulas applied to the input variables. The idea is to create human-readable features to ease the extraction of interpretation rules directly from the embedding space. Experiments on artificial and benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed family of kernels with respect to established ones, such as RBF, in terms of classification accuracy.