Anytime Subgroup Discovery in Numerical Domains with Guarantees

• Published in: Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases Vol. 11052; pp. 500 - 516
• Main Authors: Belfodil, Aimene, Belfodil, Adnene, Kaytoue, Mehdi
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2019; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Anytime algorithms; Discretization; Subgroup discovery
• ISBN: 3030109275; 9783030109271
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-10928-8_30

Subgroup discovery is the task of discovering patterns that accurately discriminate a class label from the others. Existing approaches can uncover such patterns either through an exhaustive or an approximate exploration of the pattern search space. However, an exhaustive exploration is generally unfeasible whereas approximate approaches do not provide guarantees bounding the error of the best pattern quality nor the exploration progression (“How far are we of an exhaustive search”). We design here an algorithm for mining numerical data with three key properties w.r.t. the state of the art: (i) It yields progressively interval patterns whose quality improves over time; (ii) It can be interrupted anytime and always gives a guarantee bounding the error on the top pattern quality and (iii) It always bounds a distance to the exhaustive exploration. After reporting experimentations showing the effectiveness of our method, we discuss its generalization to other kinds of patterns. Code related to this paper is available at: https://github.com/Adnene93/RefineAndMine.