F AN: Finding Accurate iNductions

Abstract

In this paper we present a machine-learning algorithm that computes a small set of accurate and interpretable rules. The decisions of these rules can be straight-forwardly explained as the conclusions drawn by a case-based reasoner. Our system is named F AN, an acronym for f inding a ccurate i n ductions. It starts from a collection of training examples and produces propositional rules able to classify unseen cases following a minimum-distance criterion in their evaluation procedure. In this way, we combine the advantages of instance-based algorithms and the conciseness of rule (or decision-tree) inducers. The algorithm followed by F AN can be seen as the result of successive steps of pruning heuristics. The main tool employed is that of the impurity level, a measure of the classification quality of a rule, inspired by a similar measure used in IB3. Finally, a number of experiments were conducted with standard benchmark datasets of the UCI repository to test the performance of our system, successfully comparing F AN with a wide collection of machine-learning algorithms.