A conflict-based confidence measure for associative classification

Associative classification has aroused significant attention recently and achieved promising results. In the rule ranking process, the confidence measure is usually used to sort the class association rules (CARs). However, it may be not good enough for a classification task due to a low discrimination power to instances in the other classes. In this paper, we propose a novel conflict-based confidence measure with an interleaving ranking strategy for re-ranking CARs in an associative classification framework, which better captures the conflict between a rule and a training data instance. In the experiments, the traditional confidence measure and our proposed conflict-based confidence measure with the interleaving ranking strategy are applied as the primary sorting criterion for CARs. The experimental results show that the proposed associative classification framework achieves promising classification accuracy with the use of the conflict-based confidence measure, particularly for an imbalanced data set.