Rule extraction from support vector machines based on consistent region covering reduction

Due to good performance in classification and regression, support vector machines have attracted much attention and become one of the most popular learning machines in last decade. As a black box, the support vector machine is difficult for users' understanding and explanation. In many application domains including medical diagnosis or credit scoring, understandability and interpretability are very important for the practicability of the learned models. To improve the comprehensibility of SVMs, we propose a rule extraction technique from support vector machines via analyzing the distribution of samples. We define the consistent region of samples in terms of classification boundary, and form a consistent region covering of the sample space. Then a covering reduction algorithm is developed for extracting compact representation of classes, thus a minimal set of decision rules is derived. Experiment analysis shows that the extracted models perform well in comparison with decision tree algorithms and other support vector machine rule extraction methods. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.