Integrating clonal selection and deterministic sampling for efficient associative classification

Traditional Associative Classification (AC) algorithms typically search for all possible association rules to find a representative subset of those rules. Since the search space of such rules may grow exponentially as the support threshold decreases, the rules discovery process can be computationally expensive. One effective way to tackle this problem is to directly find a set of high-stakes association rules that potentially builds a highly accurate classifier. This paper introduces AC-CS, an AC algorithm that integrates the clonal selection of the immune system along with deterministic data sampling. Upon picking a representative sample of the original data, it proceeds in an evolutionary fashion to populate only rules that are likely to yield good classification accuracy. Empirical results on several real datasets show that the approach generates dramatically less rules than traditional AC algorithms. In addition, the proposed approach is significantly more efficient than traditional AC algorithms while achieving a competitive accuracy.