A new pruning method for resolving conflicts in actionable behavioral rules

Among the most important and distinctive actionable knowledge are actionable behavioral rules that can directly and explicitly suggest specific actions to take to influence the behavior in the users' best interest. However, in mining such rules, it often occurs that different rules may suggest the same actions with different expected utilities, which we call conflicting rules. To resolve the conflicts, a previous pruning method was proposed. However, inconsistency of the measure for rule pruning may hinder its performance. To overcome this problem, we develop a new pruning method to achieve rule pruning in actionable rule discovery. We conduct several experiments to test our proposed approach and evaluate the sensitivity of the weight parameter. Empirical results based on a benchmark terrorism dataset indicate that our approach outperforms those from previous research.