The effect of threshold values on association rule based classification accuracy

  • Authors:
  • Frans Coenen;Paul Leng

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, The University of Liverpool, Chadwick Building, P.O. Box 147, Liverpool L69 3BX, United Kingdom;Department of Computer Science, The University of Liverpool, Chadwick Building, P.O. Box 147, Liverpool L69 3BX, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Data & Knowledge Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Classification Association Rule Mining (CARM) systems operate by applying an Association Rule Mining (ARM) method to obtain classification rules from a training set of previously classified data. The rules thus generated will be influenced by the choice of ARM parameters employed by the algorithm (typically support and confidence threshold values). In this paper we examine the effect that this choice has on the predictive accuracy of CARM methods. We show that the accuracy can almost always be improved by a suitable choice of parameters, and describe a hill-climbing method for finding the best parameter settings. We also demonstrate that the proposed hill-climbing method is most effective when coupled with a fast CARM algorithm such as the TFPC algorithm which is also described.