A Building Block Approach to Genetic Programming for Rule Discovery

Abstract

Genetic programming has recently been used successfully to extract knowledge in the form of IF-THEN rules. For these genetic programming approaches to knowledge extraction from data, individuals represent decision trees. The main objective of the evolutionary process is therefore to evolve the best decision tree, or classifier, to describe the data. Rules are then extracted, after convergence, from the best individual. The current genetic programming approaches to evolve decision trees are computationally complex, since individuals are initialized to complete decision trees. This chapter discusses a new approach to genetic programming for rule extraction, namely the building block approach. This approach starts with individuals consisting of only one building block, and adds new building blocks during the evolutionary process when the simplicity of the individuals cannot account for the complexity in the underlying data. Experimental results are presented and compared with that of C4.5 and CN2. The chapter shows that the building block approach achieves very good accuracies compared to that of C4.5 and CN2. It is also shown that the building block approach extracts substantially less rules.