Comprehensible knowledge discovery using particle swarm optimization with monotonicity constraints

Due to uncertain data quality, knowledge extracted by methods merely focusing on gaining high accuracy might result in contradiction to experts’ knowledge or sometimes even common sense. In many application areas of data mining, taking into account the monotonic relations between the response variable and predictor variables could help extracting rules with better comprehensibility. This study incorporates Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), which is a competitive heuristic technique for solving optimization tasks, with constraints of monotonicity for discovering accurate and comprehensible rules from databases. The results show that the proposed constraints-based PSO classifier can exploit rules with both comprehensibility and justifiability.