Associative Classification using Automata with Structure based Merging

Associative Classification, a combination of two important and different fields (classification and association rule mining), aims at building accurate and interpretable classifiers by means of association rules. The process used to generate association rules is exponential by nature; thus in AC, researchers focused on the reduction of redundant rules via rules pruning and rules ranking techniques. These techniques take an important part in improving the efficiency; however, pruning may negatively affect the accuracy by pruning interesting rules. Further, these techniques are time consuming in term of processing and also require domain specific knowledge to decide upon the selection of the best ranking and pruning strategy. In order to overcome these limitations, in this research, an automata based solution is proposed to improve the classifier’s accuracy while replacing ranking and pruning. A new merging concept is introduced which used structure based similarity to merge the association rules. The merging not only help to reduce the classifier size but also minimize the loss of information by avoiding the pruning. The extensive experiments showed that the proposed algorithm is efficient than AC, Naive Bayesian, and Rule and Tree based classifiers in term of accuracy, space, and speed. The merging takes the advantages of the repetition in the rules set and keep the classifier as small as possible.