An Integer Optimization Approach to Associative Classification

Allison Chang, Dimitris Bertsimas, Cynthia Rudin

Abstract: We aim to design classifiers that have the interpretability of association rules yet have predictive power on par with the top machine learning algorithms for classification. We propose a novel mixed integer optimization (MIO) approach called Ordered Rules for Classification (ORC) for this task. Our method has two parts. The first part mines a particular frontier of solutions in the space of rules, and we show that this frontier contains the best rules according to a variety of interestingness measures. The second part learns an optimal ranking for the rules to build a decision list classifier that is simple and insightful. We report empirical evidence using several different datasets to demonstrate the performance of this method.1 2