Using emerging patterns to construct weighted decision trees

Abstract

Decision trees (DTs) represent one of the most important and popular solutions to the problem of classification. They have been shown to have excellent performance in the field of data mining and machine learning. However, the problem of DTs is that they are built using data instances assigned to crisp classes. In this paper, we generalize decision trees so that they can take into account weighted classes assigned to the training data instances. Moreover, we propose a novel method for discovering weights for the training instances. Our method is based on emerging patterns (EPs). EPs are those itemsets whose supports (probabilities) in one class are significantly higher than their supports (probabilities) in the other classes. Our experimental evaluation shows that the new proposed method has good performance and excellent noise tolerance.