Encoding and decoding the knowledge of association rules over SVM classification trees

摘要

This paper presents a constructive method for association rule extraction, where the knowledge of data is encoded into an SVM classification tree (SVMT), and linguistic association rule is extracted by decoding of the trained SVMT. The method of rule extraction over the SVMT (SVMT-rule), in the spirit of decision-tree rule extraction, achieves rule extraction not only from SVM, but also over the decision-tree structure of SVMT. Thus, the obtained rules from SVMT-rule have the better comprehensibility of decision-tree rule, meanwhile retains the good classification accuracy of SVM. Moreover, profiting from the super generalization ability of SVMT owing to the aggregation of a group of SVMs, the SVMT-rule is capable of performing a very robust classification on such datasets that have seriously, even overwhelmingly, class-imbalanced data distribution. Experiments with a Gaussian synthetic data, seven benchmark cancers diagnosis, and one application of cell-phone fraud detection have highlighted the utility of SVMT and SVMT-rule on comprehensible and effective knowledge discovery, as well as the superior properties of SVMT-rule as compared to a purely support-vector based rule extraction. (A version of SVMT Matlab software is available online at http://kcir.kedri.info)