Skip to main content
Log in

PRIE: a system for generating rulelists to maximize ROC performance

  • Published:
Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Rules are commonly used for classification because they are modular, intelligible and easy to learn. Existing work in classification rule learning assumes the goal is to produce categorical classifications to maximize classification accuracy. Recent work in machine learning has pointed out the limitations of classification accuracy: when class distributions are skewed, or error costs are unequal, an accuracy maximizing classifier can perform poorly. This paper presents a method for learning rules directly from ROC space when the goal is to maximize the area under the ROC curve (AUC). Basic principles from rule learning and computational geometry are used to focus the search for promising rule combinations. The result is a system that can learn intelligible rulelists with good ROC performance.

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

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Barakat N, Bradley A (2006) Rule extraction from support vector machines: measuring the explanation capability using the area under the ROC curve. In: ICPR 2006. 18th international conference on pattern recognition, vol 2, IEEE Press, pp 812–815

  • Bradley AP (1997) The use of the area under the ROC curve in the evaluation of machine learning algorithms. Pattern Recognit 30(7): 1145–1159

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Clark P, Boswell R (1991) Rule induction with CN2: some recent improvements. In: Kodratoff Y (ed) Machine learning—proceedings of the fifth European conference, pp 151–163

  • Clark P, Niblett T (1989) The CN2 induction algorithm. Mach Learn 3: 261–283

    Google Scholar 

  • Cohen WW (1996) Learning trees and rules with set-valued features. In: AAAI/IAAI, vol. 1, pp 709–716

  • Egan JP (1975) Signal detection theory and ROC analysis. Series in cognitition and perception. Academic Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Fawcett T (2001) Using rule sets to maximize ROC performance. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on data mining (ICDM-2001), pp 131–138

  • Fawcett T (2006) An introduction to ROC analysis. Pattern Recognit Lett 27(8): 882–891

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Flach P (2004) The many faces of ROC analysis in machine learning ICML-04 Tutorial. Notes available from http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~flach/ICML04tutorial/index.html

  • Fürnkranz J (1999) Separate-and-conquer rule learning. Artif Intell Rev 13(1): 3–54

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Fürnkranz J, Flach PA (2005) Roc ‘n’ rule learning—towards a better understanding of covering algorithms. Mach Learn 58(1): 39–77

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Hanley JA, McNeil BJ (1982) The meaning and use of the area under a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. Radiology 143: 29–36

    Google Scholar 

  • Ling CX, Huang J, Zhang H (2003) Auc: a better measure than accuracy in comparing learning algorithms. In: Advances in artificial intelligence: 16th conference of the canadian society for computational studies of intelligence, Springer, pp 329–341

  • Niculescu-Mizil A, Caruana R (2005) Predicting good probabilities with supervised learning. In: Raedt LD, Wrobel S (eds) Proceedings of the twenty-second international conference on machine learning (ICML’05), ACM Press, pp 625–632

  • Prati R, Flach P (2005) Roccer: an algorithm for rule learning based on ROC analysis. In: IJCAI 2005, pp 823–828

  • Provost F, Domingos P (2001) Well-trained PETs: improving probability estimation trees. CeDER Working Paper #IS-00-04, Stern School of Business, New York University, NY, NY 10012

  • Provost F, Fawcett T (1998) Robust classification systems for imprecise environments. In: Proceedings of AAAI-98. AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA, pp 706–713

  • Provost F, Fawcett T (2001) Robust classification for imprecise environments. Mach Learn 42(3): 203–231

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Provost F, Fawcett T, Kohavi R (1998) The case against accuracy estimation for comparing induction algorithms. In: Shavlik J (ed) Proceedings of ICML-98. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA, pp 445–453. Available: http://www.purl.org/NET/tfawcett/papers/ICML98-final.ps.gz

  • Santini S, Bimbo DA (1995) Recurrent neural networks can be trained to be maximum a posteriori probability classifiers. Neural Netw 8(1): 25–29

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Srinivasan A (1999) Note on the location of optimal classifiers in n-dimensional ROC space. Technical Report PRG-TR-2-99, Oxford University Computing Laboratory, Oxford, England. Available: http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/srinivasan99note.html

  • Swets J (1988) Measuring the accuracy of diagnostic systems. Science 240: 1285–1293

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Swets JA, Dawes RM, Monahan J (2000) Better decisions through science. Sci Am 283: 82–87

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zadrozny B, Elkan C (2001) Obtaining calibrated probability estimates from decision trees and naive bayesian classiers. In: Proceedings of the eighteenth international conference on machine learning, pp 609–616

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tom Fawcett.

Additional information

Responsible editor: Bianca Zadrozny.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Fawcett, T. PRIE: a system for generating rulelists to maximize ROC performance. Data Min Knowl Disc 17, 207–224 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10618-008-0089-y

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10618-008-0089-y

Keywords

Navigation