PREDICTION PHASE IN ASSOCIATIVE CLASSIFICATION MINING

Abstract

Associative classification (AC) is an important data mining approach which effectively integrates association rule mining and classification. Prediction of test data is a fundamental step in classification that impacts the outputted system accuracy. In this paper, we present three new prediction methods (Dominant Class Label, Highest Average Confidence per Class, Full Match Rule) and one rule pruning procedure (Partial Matching) in AC. Furthermore, we review current prediction methods in AC. Experimental results on large English and Arabic text categorisation data collections (Reuters, SPA) using the proposed prediction methods and other popular classification algorithms (SVM, KNN, NB, BCAR, MCAR, C4.5, etc.), have been conducted. The bases of the comparison in the experiments are classification accuracy and the Break-Even-Point (BEP) evaluation measures. The results reveal that our prediction methods are very competitive with reference to BEP if compared with known AC prediction approaches such as those of 2-PS, ARC-BC and BCAR. Moreover, the proposed prediction methods outperform other existing methods in traditional classification approaches such as decision trees, and probabilistic with regards to accuracy. Finally, the results indicate that using the proposed pruning procedure in AC improved the accuracy of the outputted classifier.