Fragmentation problem and automated feature construction

Abstract

Selective induction algorithms are efficient in learning target concepts but inherit a major limitation each time only one feature is used to partition the data until the data is divided into uniform segments. This limitation results in problems like replication, repetition, and fragmentation. Constructive induction has been an effective means to overcome some of the problems. The underlying idea is to construct compound features that increase the representation power so as to enhance the learning algorithm's capability in partitioning data. Unfortunately, many constructive operators are often manually designed and choosing which one to apply poses a serious problem itself. We propose an automatic way of constructing compound features. The method can be applied to both continuous and discrete data and thus all the three problems can be eliminated or alleviated. Our empirical results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method.