Correlation as a heuristic for accurate and comprehensible ant colony optimization based classifiers

Abstract

The primary objective of this research is to propose and investigate a novel ant colony optimization-based classification rule discovery algorithm and its variants. The main feature of this algorithm is a new heuristic function based on the correlation between attributes of a dataset. Several aspects and parameters of the proposed algorithm are investigated by experimentation on a number of benchmark datasets. We study the performance of our proposed approach and compare it with several state-of-the art commonly used classification algorithms. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach builds more accurate models than the compared algorithms. The high accuracy supplemented by the comprehensibility of the discovered rule sets is the main advantage of this method. © 1997-2012 IEEE.