A SVM-based discretization method with application to associative classification

Associative classification has been recently proposed which combines association rule mining and classification, and many studies have shown that associative classifiers give high prediction accuracies compared with other traditional classifiers such as a decision tree. However, in order to apply association rule mining to classification problems, data transformation into the form of transaction data should be preceded before applying association rule mining. In this paper, we propose a discretization method based on Support vector machines, which can improve the performance of association classification greatly. The proposed method finds optimal class boundaries by using SVM, and discretization utilizing distances to the boundaries is performed. Experimental results demonstrate that performing SVM-based discretization for continuous attributes makes associative classification more effective in that it reduces the number of classification rules mined and also improves the prediction accuracies at the same time.