Improving rule based classification using harmony search

Classification and associative rule mining are two substantial areas in data mining. Some scientists attempt to integrate these two field called rule-based classifiers. Rule-based classifiers can play a very important role in applications such as fraud detection, medical diagnosis, and etc. Numerous previous studies have shown that this type of classifiers achieves high classification accuracy than traditional classification algorithms. However, they still suffer from a fundamental limitation. Many rule-based classifiers used various greedy techniques to prune the redundant rules that lead to missing some important rules. Another challenge that must be considered is related to the enormous set of mined rules that result in high processing overhead. The result of these approaches is that the final selected rules may not be the global best rules. These algorithms are not successful at exploiting search space effectively in order to select the best subset of candidate rules. We merged the Apriori algorithm, harmony search, and classification based association rules (CBA) algorithm for building a rule-based classifier. We applied a modified version of the Apriori algorithm with multiple minimum support for extracting useful rules for each class in the dataset. Instead of using a large number of candidate rules, binary harmony search was utilized for selecting the best subset of rules that appropriate for building a classification model. We applied the proposed method on seventeen benchmark dataset and compared its result with traditional association rule classification algorithms. The statistical results show that our proposed method outperformed other rule-based approaches.