Genetic Algorithm Approach to Automated Discovery of Comprehensible Production Rules

Abstract

In the recent past, there has been an increasing interest in applying evolutionary methods to Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) and a number of successful applications of Genetic Algorithms (GA) and Genetic Programming (GP) to KDD have been demonstrated. The most predominant representation of the discovered knowledge is the standard Production Rules (PRs) in the form If P Then D. This paper presents a classification algorithm based on GA approach that discovers comprehensible rules in the form of PRs. The proposed approach has flexible chromosome encoding, where each chromosome corresponds to a PR. For the proposed scheme a suitable and effective fitness function and appropriate genetic operators are proposed for the suggested representation. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm.