Automatic Design of Ant-Miner Mixed Attributes for Classification Rule Discovery

Ant-Miner Mixed Attributes (Ant-Miner(MA)) was inspired and built based on ACO(MV), which uses an archive-based pheromone model to cope with mixed attribute types. On the one hand, the use of an archive-based pheromone model improved significantly the runtime of Ant-Miner(MA) and helped to eliminate the need for discretisation procedure when dealing with continuous attributes. On the other hand, the graph-based pheromone model showed superiority when dealing with datasets containing a large size of attributes, as the graph helps the algorithm to easily identify good attributes. In this paper, we propose an automatic design framework to incorporate the graph-based model along with the archive-based model in the rule creation process. We compared the automatically designed hybrid algorithm against existing ACO-based algorithms: one using a graph-based pheromone model and one using an archive-based pheromone model. Our results show that the hybrid algorithm improves the predictive quality over both the base archive-based and graph-based algorithms.