Predicting Paper Acceptance via Interpretable Decision Sets

Measuring the quality of research work is an essential component of the scientific process. With the ever-growing rates of articles being submitted to top-tier conferences, and the potential consistency and bias issues in the peer review process identified by scientific community, it is thus of great necessary and challenge to automatically evaluate submissions. Existing works mainly focus on exploring relevant factors and applying machine learning models to simply be accurate at predicting the acceptance of a given academic paper, while ignoring the interpretability power which is required by a wide range of applications. In this paper, we propose a framework to construct decision sets that consist of unordered if-then rules for predicting paper acceptance. We formalize decision set learning problem via a joint objective function that simultaneously optimize accuracy and interpretability of the rules, rather than organizing them in a hierarchy. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework by applying it on a public scientific peer reviews dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the learned interpretable decision sets by our framework performs on par with state-of-the-art classification algorithms which optimize exclusively for predictive accuracy and much more interpretable than rule-based methods.