Data Mining

Classification: Alternative Techniques

Lecture Notes for Chapter 4

Rule-Based

Introduction to Data Mining , 2nd Edition

by
Tan, Steinbach, Karpatne, Kumar

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Rule-Based Classifier

 Classify records by using a collection of “if…

then…” rules

 Rule: (Condition)  y
– where
 Condition is a conjunctions of attributes
 y is the class label
– LHS: rule antecedent or condition
– RHS: rule consequent
– Examples of classification rules:
 (Blood Type=Warm)  (Lay Eggs=Yes)  Birds
 (Taxable Income < 50K)  (Refund=Yes)  Evade=No
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Rule-based Classifier (Example)
Name Blood Type Give Birth Can Fly Live in Water Class
human warm yes no no mammals
python cold no no no reptiles
salmon cold no no yes fishes
whale warm yes no yes mammals
frog cold no no sometimes amphibians
komodo cold no no no reptiles
bat warm yes yes no mammals
pigeon warm no yes no birds
cat warm yes no no mammals
leopard shark cold yes no yes fishes
turtle cold no no sometimes reptiles
penguin warm no no sometimes birds
porcupine warm yes no no mammals
eel cold no no yes fishes
salamander cold no no sometimes amphibians
gila monster cold no no no reptiles
platypus warm no no no mammals
owl warm no yes no birds
dolphin warm yes no yes mammals
eagle warm no yes no birds

R1: (Give Birth = no)  (Can Fly = yes)  Birds

R2: (Give Birth = no)  (Live in Water = yes)  Fishes
R3: (Give Birth = yes)  (Blood Type = warm)  Mammals
R4: (Give Birth = no)  (Can Fly = no)  Reptiles
R5: (Live in Water = sometimes)  Amphibians
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 Application of Rule-Based Classifier

 A rule r covers an instance x if the attributes of

the instance satisfy the condition of the rule
R1: (Give Birth = no)  (Can Fly = yes)  Birds
R2: (Give Birth = no)  (Live in Water = yes)  Fishes
R3: (Give Birth = yes)  (Blood Type = warm)  Mammals
R4: (Give Birth = no)  (Can Fly = no)  Reptiles
R5: (Live in Water = sometimes)  Amphibians

Name Blood Type Give Birth Can Fly Live in Water Class
hawk warm no yes no ?
grizzly bear warm yes no no ?

The rule R1 covers a hawk => Bird

The rule R3 covers the grizzly bear => Mammal

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Rule Coverage and Accuracy
Tid Refund Marital Taxable
 Coverage of a rule: Status Income Class

– Fraction of records 1 Yes Single 125K No

2 No Married 100K No
that satisfy the
3 No Single 70K No
antecedent of a rule 4 Yes Married 120K No
 Accuracy of a rule: 5 No Divorced 95K Yes
6 No Married 60K No
– Fraction of records 7 Yes Divorced 220K No
that satisfy the 8 No Single 85K Yes

antecedent that 9 No Married 75K No

also satisfy the 10 No Single

10
90K Yes

consequent of a (Status=Single)  No
rule Coverage = 40%, Accuracy = 50%

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How does Rule-based Classifier Work?

R1: (Give Birth = no)  (Can Fly = yes)  Birds

R2: (Give Birth = no)  (Live in Water = yes)  Fishes
R3: (Give Birth = yes)  (Blood Type = warm)  Mammals
R4: (Give Birth = no)  (Can Fly = no)  Reptiles
R5: (Live in Water = sometimes)  Amphibians

Name Blood Type Give Birth Can Fly Live in Water Class
lemur warm yes no no ?
turtle cold no no sometimes ?
dogfish shark cold yes no yes ?

A lemur triggers rule R3, so it is classified as a mammal

A turtle triggers both R4 and R5
A dogfish shark triggers none of the rules

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Characteristics of Rule Sets: Strategy 1

 Mutually exclusive rules

– Classifier contains mutually exclusive rules if
the rules are independent of each other
– Every record is covered by at most one rule

 Exhaustive rules
– Classifier has exhaustive coverage if it
accounts for every possible combination of
attribute values
– Each record is covered by at least one rule
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Characteristics of Rule Sets: Strategy 2

 Rules are not mutually exclusive

– A record may trigger more than one rule
– Solution?
 Ordered rule set
 Unordered rule set – use voting schemes

 Rules are not exhaustive

– A record may not trigger any rules
– Solution?
 Use a default class
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Ordered Rule Set

 Rules are rank ordered according to their priority

– An ordered rule set is known as a decision list
 When a test record is presented to the classifier
– It is assigned to the class label of the highest ranked rule it has
triggered
– If none of the rules fired, it is assigned to the default class

R1: (Give Birth = no)  (Can Fly = yes)  Birds

R2: (Give Birth = no)  (Live in Water = yes)  Fishes
R3: (Give Birth = yes)  (Blood Type = warm)  Mammals
R4: (Give Birth = no)  (Can Fly = no)  Reptiles
R5: (Live in Water = sometimes)  Amphibians

Name Blood Type Give Birth Can Fly Live in Water Class
turtle cold no no sometimes ?
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Rule Ordering Schemes

 Rule-based ordering
– Individual rules are ranked based on their quality
 Class-based ordering
– Rules that belong to the same class appear together

Rule-based Ordering Class-based Ordering

(Refund=Yes) ==> No (Refund=Yes) ==> No

(Refund=No, Marital Status={Single,Divorced}, (Refund=No, Marital Status={Single,Divorced},

Taxable Income<80K) ==> No Taxable Income<80K) ==> No

(Refund=No, Marital Status={Single,Divorced}, (Refund=No, Marital Status={Married}) ==> No

Taxable Income>80K) ==> Yes
(Refund=No, Marital Status={Single,Divorced},
(Refund=No, Marital Status={Married}) ==> No Taxable Income>80K) ==> Yes

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Building Classification Rules

 Direct Method:
 Extract rules directly from data
 Examples: RIPPER, CN2, Holte’s 1R

 Indirect Method:
 Extract rules from other classification models (e.g.
decision trees, neural networks, etc).
 Examples: C4.5rules

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Direct Method: Sequential Covering

1. Start from an empty rule

2. Grow a rule using the Learn-One-Rule function
3. Remove training records covered by the rule
4. Repeat Step (2) and (3) until stopping criterion
is met

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Example of Sequential Covering

(i) Original Data (ii) Step 1

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Example of Sequential Covering…

R1 R1

R2

(iii) Step 2 (iv) Step 3

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Instance Elimination

 Why do we need to
eliminate instances?
R3 R2
– Otherwise, the next rule is
R1
identical to previous rule + + + + +
+ ++ +
 Why do we remove class = +
+
+++
+ +
+
+
+
+ +
positive instances? + + + +
+ + +
+ +
– Ensure that the next rule is - - -
- - - - -
different - -
- -
 Why do we remove class = -
-
-
-
negative instances? -
-
- -
-
– Prevent underestimating -
accuracy of rule
– Compare rules R2 and R3
in the diagram

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 Rule Growing

 Two common strategies

Yes: 3
{} No: 4
Refund=No, Refund=No,
Status=Single, Status=Single,
Income=85K Income=90K
(Class=Yes) (Class=Yes)

Refund=
No
Status =
Single
Status =
Divorced
Status =
Married
... Income
> 80K
Refund=No,
Status = Single
Yes: 3 Yes: 2 Yes: 1 Yes: 0 Yes: 3 (Class = Yes)
No: 4 No: 1 No: 0 No: 3 No: 1

(a) General-to-specific (b) Specific-to-general

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Rule Evaluation
FOIL: First Order
 Foil’s Information Gain Inductive Learner – an
early rule-based learning
algorithm 
– R0: {} => class (initial rule)
– R1: {A} => class (rule after adding conjunct)

– Gain(R0, R1) = t [ log (p1/(p1+n1)) – log (p0/(p0 + n0)) ]

– where t: number of positive instances covered by

both R0 and R1
p0: number of positive instances covered by R0
n0: number of negative instances covered by R0
p1: number of positive instances covered by R1
n1: number of negative instances covered by R1

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Direct Method: RIPPER

 For 2-class problem, choose one of the classes as

positive class, and the other as negative class
– Learn rules for positive class
– Negative class will be default class
 For multi-class problem
– Order the classes according to increasing class
prevalence (fraction of instances that belong to a
particular class)
– Learn the rule set for smallest class first, treat the rest
as negative class
– Repeat with next smallest class as positive class

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Direct Method: RIPPER

 Growing a rule:
– Start from empty rule
– Add conjuncts as long as they improve FOIL’s
information gain
– Stop when rule no longer covers negative examples
– Prune the rule immediately using incremental reduced
error pruning
– Measure for pruning: v = (p-n)/(p+n)
 p: number of positive examples covered by the rule in
the validation set
 n: number of negative examples covered by the rule in
the validation set
– Pruning method: delete any final sequence of
conditions that maximizes v
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Direct Method: RIPPER

 Building a Rule Set:

– Use sequential covering algorithm
 Finds the best rule that covers the current set of
positive examples
 Eliminate both positive and negative examples
covered by the rule
– Each time a rule is added to the rule set,
compute the new description length
 Stop adding new rules when the new description
length is d bits longer than the smallest description
length obtained so far

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Direct Method: RIPPER

 Optimize the rule set:

– For each rule r in the rule set R
 Consider 2 alternative rules:
– Replacement rule (r*): grow new rule from scratch
– Revised rule(r′): add conjuncts to extend the rule r
 Compare the rule set for r against the rule set for r*
and r′
 Choose rule set that minimizes MDL principle
– Repeat rule generation and rule optimization
for the remaining positive examples

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Indirect Methods

P
No Yes

Q R Rule Set

No Yes No Yes r1: (P=No,Q=No) ==> -

r2: (P=No,Q=Yes) ==> +
- + + Q r3: (P=Yes,R=No) ==> +
r4: (P=Yes,R=Yes,Q=No) ==> -
No Yes
r5: (P=Yes,R=Yes,Q=Yes) ==> +
- +

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Indirect Method: C4.5rules

 Extract rules from an unpruned decision tree

 For each rule, r: A  y,
– consider an alternative rule r′: A′  y where A′
is obtained by removing one of the conjuncts
in A
– Compare the pessimistic error rate for r
against all r’s
– Prune if one of the alternative rules has lower
pessimistic error rate
– Repeat until we can no longer improve
generalization error

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Indirect Method: C4.5rules

 Instead of ordering the rules, order subsets of

rules (class ordering)
– Each subset is a collection of rules with the
same rule consequent (class)
– Compute description length of each subset
 Description length = L(error) + g L(model)
 g is a parameter that takes into account the
presence of redundant attributes in a rule set
(default value = 0.5)

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Example
Name Give Birth Lay Eggs Can Fly Live in Water Have Legs Class
human yes no no no yes mammals
python no yes no no no reptiles
salmon no yes no yes no fishes
whale yes no no yes no mammals
frog no yes no sometimes yes amphibians
komodo no yes no no yes reptiles
bat yes no yes no yes mammals
pigeon no yes yes no yes birds
cat yes no no no yes mammals
leopard shark yes no no yes no fishes
turtle no yes no sometimes yes reptiles
penguin no yes no sometimes yes birds
porcupine yes no no no yes mammals
eel no yes no yes no fishes
salamander no yes no sometimes yes amphibians
gila monster no yes no no yes reptiles
platypus no yes no no yes mammals
owl no yes yes no yes birds
dolphin yes no no yes no mammals
eagle no yes yes no yes birds

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 C4.5 versus C4.5rules versus RIPPER

Give C4.5rules:
Birth? (Give Birth=No, Can Fly=Yes)  Birds
(Give Birth=No, Live in Water=Yes)  Fishes
Yes No (Give Birth=Yes)  Mammals
(Give Birth=No, Can Fly=No, Live in Water=No)  Reptiles
Mammals Live In ( )  Amphibians
Water?
Yes No RIPPER:
(Live in Water=Yes)  Fishes
Sometimes (Have Legs=No)  Reptiles
(Give Birth=No, Can Fly=No, Live In Water=No)
Fishes Amphibians Can
Fly?  Reptiles
(Can Fly=Yes,Give Birth=No)  Birds
Yes No
()  Mammals

Birds Reptiles

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C4.5 versus C4.5rules versus RIPPER

C4.5 and C4.5rules:

PREDICT ED CLASS
Amphibians Fishes Reptiles Birds M ammals
ACT UAL Amphibians 2 0 0 0 0
CLASS Fishes 0 2 0 0 1
Reptiles 1 0 3 0 0
Birds 1 0 0 3 0
M ammals 0 0 1 0 6

RIPPER:
PREDICT ED CLASS
Amphibians Fishes Reptiles Birds M ammals
ACT UAL Amphibians 0 0 0 0 2
CLASS Fishes 0 3 0 0 0
Reptiles 0 0 3 0 1
Birds 0 0 1 2 1
M ammals 0 2 1 0 4

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Advantages of Rule-Based Classifiers

 Has characteristics quite similar to decision trees

– As highly expressive as decision trees
– Easy to interpret
– Performance comparable to decision trees
– Can handle redundant attributes

 Better suited for handling imbalanced classes

 Harder to handle missing values in the test set

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