Incremental Rule-based Learning

Abstract

In a system which learns to predict the value of an output variable given one or more input variables by looking at a set of examples, a rule-based knowledge representation provides not only a natural method of constructing a classifier, but also a human-readable explanation of what has been learned. Consider a rule of the form if y then x where y is a conjunction of values of input variables and x is a value of the output variable. The number of input variables in y is called the order of the rule. In previous work, a measure of the information content or "value" of such a rule has been developed (the J-measure. It has been shown in [3] that a classifier can be built from the rules obtained by a constrained search of all possible rules which performs comparably with other classifiers.