Annealing strategy for an enhance rule pruning technique in ACO-Based rule classification

Abstract

<span>Ant colony optimization (ACO) was successfully applied to data mining classification task through ant-mining algorithms. Exploration and exploitation are search strategies that guide the learning process of a classification model and generate a list of rules. Exploitation refers to the process of intensifying the search for neighbors in good regions, </span><span>whereas exploration aims towards new promising regions during a search process. </span><span>The existing balance between exploration and exploitation in the rule construction procedure is limited to the roulette wheel selection mechanism, which complicates rule generation. Thus, low-coverage complex rules with irrelevant terms will be generated. This work proposes an enhancement rule pruning procedure for the ACO algorithm that can be used in rule-based classification. This procedure, called the annealing strategy, is an improvement of ant-mining algorithms in the rule construction procedure. Presented as a pre-pruning technique, the annealing strategy deals first with irrelevant terms before creating a complete rule through an annealing schedule. The proposed improvement was tested through benchmarking experiments, and results were compared with those of four of the most related ant-mining algorithms, namely, Ant-Miner, CAnt-Miner, TACO-Miner, and Ant-Miner with hybrid pruner. </span><span>Results display that our proposed technique achieves better performance in terms of classification accuracy, model size, and </span><span>computational time. </span><span>The proposed annealing schedule can be used in other ACO variants for different applications to improve classification accuracy.</span>