PRRAT_AM—An advanced ant-miner to extract accurate and comprehensible classification rules

Ant-Miner, a rule-based classification algorithm, has been successfully applied for classification tasks but it has some limitations such as getting stuck in local optima, high selective pressure, fixed exploration and exploitation rate, and premature convergence. In this paper, we have proposed a novel Ant-Miner based technique based on new Pheromone update method, Rule Rejection threshold, Adaptive gamma, and altered Tournament selection (PRRAT_AM) that caters to these limitations. The proposed algorithm introduced an adaptive gamma parameter to avoid fixed exploration and exploitation rate. To decrease the selective pressure, pheromone is updated by weighted average of rule length, rule quality and heuristic of the path. Ants are selected using improved tournament selection strategy to update the pheromone. Rules that covered less than one percent of the training examples are rejected to generate generic rules. These improvements aid PRRAT_AM in avoiding premature convergence and high selective pressure. We have tested the proposed approach on eight publicly available data-sets on standard benchmark performance measures that include accuracy and F1-score. The proposed approach has been compared with state of the art versions of Ant-Miner and with various data mining algorithms. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach achieved better results when compared with other techniques in terms of standard performance measures and convergence speed.