Rule Extraction using Artificial Neural Networks

Artificial neural networks have been successfully applied to a variety of business application problems involving classification and regression. Although backpropagation neural networks generally predict better than decision trees do for pattern classification problems, they are often regarded as black boxes, i.e., their predictions are not as interpretable as those of decision trees. In many applications, it is desirable to extract knowledge from trained neural networks so that the users can gain a better understanding of the solution. This paper presents an efficient algorithm to extract rules from artificial neural networks. We use two-phase training algorithm for backpropagation learning. In the first phase, the number of hidden nodes of the network is determined automatically in a constructive fashion by adding nodes one after another based on the performance of the network on training data. In the second phase, the number of relevant input units of the network is determined using pruning algorithm. The pruning process attempts to eliminate as many connections as possible from the network. Relevant and irrelevant attributes of the data are distinguished during the training process. Those that are relevant will be kept and others will be automatically discarded. From the simplified networks having small number of connections and nodes we may easily able to extract symbolic rules using the proposed algorithm. Extensive experimental results on several benchmarks problems in neural networks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach with good generalization ability.

Pattern Classification using Simplified Neural Networks

In recent years, many neural network models have been proposed for pattern classification, function approximation and regression problems. This paper presents an approach for classifying patterns from simplified NNs. Although the predictive accuracy of ANNs is often higher than that of other methods or human experts, it is often said that ANNs are practically "black boxes", due to the complexity of the networks. In this paper, we have an attempted to open up these black boxes by reducing the complexity of the network. The factor makes this possible is the pruning algorithm. By eliminating redundant weights, redundant input and hidden units are identified and removed from the network. Using the pruning algorithm, we have been able to prune networks such that only a few input units, hidden units and connections left yield a simplified network. Experimental results on several benchmarks problems in neural networks show the effectiveness of the proposed approach with good generalization ability.

Text Classification using Association Rule with a Hybrid Concept of Naive Bayes Classifier and Genetic Algorithm

Text classification is the automated assignment of natural language texts to predefined categories based on their content. Text classification is the primary requirement of text retrieval systems, which retrieve texts in response to a user query, and text understanding systems, which transform text in some way such as producing summaries, answering questions or extracting data. Now a day the demand of text classification is increasing tremendously. Keeping this demand into consideration, new and updated techniques are being developed for the purpose of automated text classification. This paper presents a new algorithm for text classification. Instead of using words, word relation i.e. association rules is used to derive feature set from pre-classified text documents. The concept of Naive Bayes Classifier is then used on derived features and finally a concept of Genetic Algorithm has been added for final classification. A system based on the proposed algorithm has been implemented and tested. The experimental results show that the proposed system works as a successful text classifier.

Medical diagnosis using neural network

This research is to search for alternatives to the resolution of complex medical diagnosis where human knowledge should be apprehended in a general fashion. Successful application examples show that human diagnostic capabilities are significantly worse than the neural diagnostic system. This paper describes a modified feedforward neural network constructive algorithm (MFNNCA), a new algorithm for medical diagnosis. The new constructive algorithm with backpropagation; offer an approach for the incremental construction of near-minimal neural network architectures for pattern classification. The algorithm starts with minimal number of hidden units in the single hidden layer; additional units are added to the hidden layer one at a time to improve the accuracy of the network and to get an optimal size of a neural network. The MFNNCA was tested on several benchmarking classification problems including the cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Experimental results show that the MFNNCA can produce optimal neural network architecture with good generalization ability.