Incremental Induction of Decision Rules from Dominance-based Rough Approximations

Abstract

An incremental algorithm generating satisfactory decision rules and a rule post-processing technique are presented. The rule induction algorithm is based on the Apriori algorithm. It is extended to handle preference-ordered domains of attributes (called criteria) within Variable Consistency Dominance-based Rough Set Approach. It deals, moreover, with the problem of missing values in the data set. The algorithm has been designed for medical applications which require: (i) a careful selection of the set of decision rules representing medical experience and (ii) an easy update of these decision rules because of data set evolving in time, and (iii) not only a high predictive capacity of the set of decision rules but also a thorough explanation of a proposed decision. To satisfy all these requirements, we propose an incremental algorithm for induction of a satisfactory set of decision rules and a post-processing technique on the generated set of rules. Userʼns preferences with respect to attributes are also taken into account. A measure of the quality of a decision rule is proposed. It is used to select the most interesting representatives in the final set of rules.