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Evaluation of Interestingness Measures for Ranking Discovered Knowledge

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Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2001)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 2035))

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Abstract

When mining a large database, the number of patterns discovered can easily exceed the capabilities of a human user to identify interesting results. To address this problem, various techniques have been suggested to reduce and/or order the patterns prior to presenting them to the user. In this paper, our focus is on ranking summaries generated from a single dataset, where attributes can be generalized in many different ways and to many levels of granularity according to taxonomic hierarchies. We theoretically and empirically evaluate thirteen diversity measures used as heuristic measures of interestingness for ranking summaries generated from databases. The thirteen diversity measures have previously been utilized in various disciplines, such as information theory, statistics, ecology, and economics. We describe five principles that any measure must satisfy to be considered useful for ranking summaries. Theoretical results show that only four of the thirteen diversity measures satisfy all of the principles. We then analyze the distribution of the index values generated by each of the thirteen diversity measures. Empirical results, obtained using synthetic data, show that the distribution of index values generated tend to be highly skewed about the mean, median, and middle index values. The objective of this work is to gain some insight into the behaviour that can be expected from each of the measures in practice.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Saskatchewan Population Health and Evaluation Research Unit, Canada

    Robert J. Hilderman

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, S4S 0A2

    Howard J. Hamilton

Authors
  1. Robert J. Hilderman
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  2. Howard J. Hamilton
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Computer Science and Information Systems, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong China

    David Cheung

  2. CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences, GPO Box 664, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia

    Graham J. Williams

  3. Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Ave., Kowloon, Hong Kong China

    Qing Li

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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Hilderman, R.J., Hamilton, H.J. (2001). Evaluation of Interestingness Measures for Ranking Discovered Knowledge. In: Cheung, D., Williams, G.J., Li, Q. (eds) Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. PAKDD 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2035. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45357-1_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45357-1_28

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-41910-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45357-4

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