Mining action rules from scratch

  • Authors:
  • Zengyou He;Xiaofei Xu;Shengchun Deng;Ronghua Ma

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, 92 West Dazhi Street, P.O Box 315, Harbin 150001, People's Republic of China;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, 92 West Dazhi Street, P.O Box 315, Harbin 150001, People's Republic of China;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, 92 West Dazhi Street, P.O Box 315, Harbin 150001, People's Republic of China;Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, CAS, Nanjing 210008, People's Republic of China

  • Venue:
  • Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Action rules provide hints to a business user what actions (i.e. changes within some values of flexible attributes) should be taken to improve the profitability of customers. That is, taking some actions to re-classify some customers from less desired decision class to the more desired one. However, in previous work, each action rule was constructed from two rules, extracted earlier, defining different profitability classes. In this paper, we make a first step towards formally introducing the problem of mining action rules from scratch and present formal definitions. In contrast to previous work, our formulation provides guarantee on verifying completeness and correctness of discovered action rules. In addition to formulating the problem from an inductive learning viewpoint, we provide theoretical analysis on the complexities of the problem and its variations. Furthermore, we present efficient algorithms for mining action rules from scratch. In an experimental study we demonstrate the usefulness of our techniques.