Coverage-based classification using association rule mining

Abstract

Building accurate and compact classifiers in real-world applications is one of the crucial tasks in data mining nowadays. In this paper, we propose a new method that can reduce the number of class association rules produced by classical class association rule classifiers, while maintaining an accurate classification model that is comparable to the ones generated by state-of-the-art classification algorithms. More precisely, we propose a new associative classifier that selects “strong” class association rules based on overall coverage of the learning set. The advantage of the proposed classifier is that it generates significantly smaller rules on bigger datasets compared to traditional classifiers while maintaining the classification accuracy. We also discuss how the overall coverage of such classifiers affects their classification accuracy. Performed experiments measuring classification accuracy, number of classification rules and other relevance measures such as precision, recall and f-measure on 12 real-life datasets from the UCI ML repository (Dua, D.; Graff, C. UCI Machine Learning Repository. Irvine, CA: University of California, 2019) show that our method was comparable to 8 other well-known rule-based classification algorithms. It achieved the second-highest average accuracy (84.9%) and the best result in terms of average number of rules among all classification methods. Although not achieving the best results in terms of classification accuracy, our method proved to be producing compact and understandable classifiers by exhaustively searching the entire example space.