Rule preference effect in associative classification mining

Classification based on association rule mining, also known as associative classification, is a promising approach in data mining that builds accurate classifiers. In this paper, a rule ranking process within the associative classification approach is investigated. Specifically, two common rule ranking methods in associative classification are compared with reference to their impact on accuracy. We also propose a new rule ranking procedure that adds more tie breaking conditions to the existing methods in order to reduce rule random selection. In particular, our method looks at the class distribution frequency associated with the tied rules and favours those that are associated with the majority class. We compare the impact of the proposed rule ranking method and two other methods presented in associative classification against 14 highly dense classification data sets. Our results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed rule ranking method on the quality of the resulting classifiers for the majority of the benchmark problems, which we consider. This provides evidence that adding more appropriate constraints to break ties between rules positively affects the predictive power of the resulting associative classifiers.