Automating the Design of Data Mining Algorithms

This unique text seeks to automate the design of a data mining algorithm. It first overviews data mining and evolutionary algorithms then discusses the design of a new genetic programming system for automating the design of full rule induction algorithms.

Data mining is a very active research area with many successful real-world app- cations. It consists of a set of concepts and methods used to extract interesting or useful knowledge (or patterns) from real-world datasets, providing valuable support for decision making in industry, business, government, and science. Although there are already many types of data mining algorithms available in the literature, it is still dif cult for users to choose the best possible data mining algorithm for their particular data mining problem. In addition, data mining al- rithms have been manually designed; therefore they incorporate human biases and preferences. This book proposes a new approach to the design of data mining algorithms. - stead of relying on the slow and ad hoc process of manual algorithm design, this book proposes systematically automating the design of data mining algorithms with an evolutionary computation approach. More precisely, we propose a genetic p- gramming system (a type of evolutionary computation method that evolves c- puter programs) to automate the design of rule induction algorithms, a type of cl- si cation method that discovers a set of classi cation rules from data. We focus on genetic programming in this book because it is the paradigmatic type of machine learning method for automating the generation of programs and because it has the advantage of performing a global search in the space of candidate solutions (data mining algorithms in our case), but in principle other types of search methods for this task could be investigated in the future.

This book proposes a different goal for evolutionary algorithms in data mining: to automate the design of a data mining algorithm, rather than just optimize its parameters. Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Klappentext

Traditionally, evolutionary computing techniques have been applied in the area of data mining either to optimize the parameters of data mining algorithms or to discover knowledge or patterns in the data, i.e., to directly solve the target data mining problem. This book proposes a different goal for evolutionary algorithms in data mining: to automate the design of a data mining algorithm, rather than just optimize its parameters.The authors first offer introductory overviews on data mining, focusing on rule induction methods, and on evolutionary algorithms, focusing on genetic programming. They then examine the conventional use of evolutionary algorithms to discover classification rules or related types of knowledge structures in the data, before moving to the more ambitious objective of their research, the design of a new genetic programming system for automating the design of full rule induction algorithms. They analyze computational results from their automatically designed algorithms, which show that the machine-designed rule induction algorithms are competitive when compared with state-of-the-art human-designed algorithms. Finally the authors examine future research directions.This book will be useful for researchers and practitioners in the areas of data mining and evolutionary computation.

Inhalt
Data Mining.- Evolutionary Algorithms.- Genetic Programming for Classification and Algorithm Design.- Automating the Design of Rule Induction Algorithms.- Computational Results on the Automatic Design of Full Rule Induction Algorithms.- Directions for Future Research on the Automatic Design of Data Mining Algorithms.