Customized generalization of support patterns for classification.

We propose a novel classification learning method called customized support pattern learner (CSPL). Given an instance to be classified, CSPL explores and discovers support patterns (SPs), which are essentially attribute value subsets of the instance to be classified. The final prediction of the class label is performed by combining some statistics of the discovered useful SPs. One advantage of the CSPL method is that it can explore a richer hypothesis space and discover useful classification patterns involving attribute values with almost indistinguishable information gain. The customized learning characteristic also allows that the target class can vary for different instances to be classified. It facilitates extremely easy training instance maintenance and updates. We have evaluated our method with real-world problems and benchmark data sets. The results demonstrate that CSPL can achieve good performance and high reliability.