Rule extraction from decision tree: Transparent expert system of rules
Arpita Nath Boruah, Saroj Kr. Biswas, Sivaji Bandyopadhyay · Concurrency and Computation Practice and Experience · 2022
Abstract A system which is transparent and has less decision rules is an efficient, user‐convincing system and moreover convenient and manageable to fields like banking, business, and medical. Decision Tree (DT) is a data mining technique which is transparent and produces a set of production rules for decision‐making. However sometimes it creates some unnecessary and redundant rules which diminish its comprehensibility. Thus a system named Transparent Expert System of Rules (TESR) is proposed in this paper to efficiently improve comprehensibility of the DT by reducing the number of rules drastically without compromising accuracy. The proposed system adopts a Sequential Hill Climbing method with a flexible heuristic function to prune the insignificant rules from decision rules generated by DT. Finally, the proposed TESR system produces a transparent and comprehensible rule set for a decision. The proposed TESR performance is evaluated using 10 datasets and is compared with simple DT (ID3, C4.5, and Classification and Regression Trees) and also two of the existing transparent systems with respect to comprehensibility, accuracy, precision, recall, and F‐measures.