Skip to main content

An Empirical Comparison of Probability Estimation Techniques for Probabilistic Rules

  • Conference paper
Discovery Science (DS 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 5808))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Rule learning is known for its descriptive and therefore comprehensible classification models which also yield good class predictions. However, in some application areas, we also need good class probability estimates. For different classification models, such as decision trees, a variety of techniques for obtaining good probability estimates have been proposed and evaluated. However, so far, there has been no systematic empirical study of how these techniques can be adapted to probabilistic rules and how these methods affect the probability-based rankings. In this paper we apply several basic methods for the estimation of class membership probabilities to classification rules. We also study the effect of a shrinkage technique for merging the probability estimates of rules with those of their generalizations.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  • Asuncion, A., Newman, D.J.: UCI machine learning repository (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  • Cestnik, B.: Estimating probabilities: A crucial task in Machine Learning. In: Aiello, L. (ed.) Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 1990), Stockholm, Sweden, pp. 147–150. Pitman (1990)

    Google Scholar 

  • Chen, S.F., Goodman, J.T.: An empirical study of smoothing techniques for language modeling. Technical Report TR-10-98, Computer Science Group, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  • Cohen, W.W.: Fast effective rule induction. In: Prieditis, A., Russell, S. (eds.) Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Machine Learning (ML 1995), Lake Tahoe, CA, pp. 115–123. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1995)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Demsar, J.: Statistical comparisons of classifiers over multiple data sets. Journal of Machine Learning Research 7, 1–30 (2006)

    MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Ferri, C., Flach, P.A., Hernández-Orallo, J.: Improving the AUC of probabilistic estimation trees. In: Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Machine Learning, Cavtat-Dubrovnik, Croatia, pp. 121–132 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  • Fürnkranz, J.: Pruning algorithms for rule learning. Machine Learning 27(2), 139–171 (1997)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fürnkranz, J., Flach, P.A.: Roc ’n’ rule learning-towards a better understanding of covering algorithms. Machine Learning 58(1), 39–77 (2005)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Fürnkranz, J., Widmer, G.: Incremental Reduced Error Pruning. In: Cohen, W., Hirsh, H. (eds.) Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Machine Learning (ML 1994), New Brunswick, NJ, pp. 70–77. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1994)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Hand, D.J., Till, R.J.: A simple generalisation of the area under the roc curve for multiple class classification problems. Machine Learning 45(2), 171–186 (2001)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Hüllermeier, E., Vanderlooy, S.: Why fuzzy decision trees are good rankers. IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems (to appear, 2009)

    Google Scholar 

  • Manning, C.D., Schütze, H.: Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing. The MIT Press, Cambridge (1999)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Provost, F.J., Domingos, P.: Tree induction for probability-based ranking. Machine Learning 52(3), 199–215 (2003)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Wang, B., Zhang, H.: Improving the ranking performance of decision trees. In: Fürnkranz, J., Scheffer, T., Spiliopoulou, M. (eds.) ECML 2006. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4212, pp. 461–472. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Witten, I.H., Frank, E.: Data Mining: Practical machine learning tools and techniques, 2nd edn. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (2005)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Sulzmann, JN., Fürnkranz, J. (2009). An Empirical Comparison of Probability Estimation Techniques for Probabilistic Rules. In: Gama, J., Costa, V.S., Jorge, A.M., Brazdil, P.B. (eds) Discovery Science. DS 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5808. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04747-3_25

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04747-3_25

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-04746-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-04747-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics