A heuristic method for discovering multi-class classification rules from multi-source data in cloud–edge system

The integration of diverse devices has made the establishment of multi-class classification models for multi-source data a primary concern for data mining in cloud–edge system. Developing rule-based classifiers is essential because they present results that express the reasons for classification. However, existing rule learning methods are not compatible with multi-source tabular data containing mixed features, imbalanced labels and missing values, making it difficult to build cross-data source and cross-device data mining models. We developed a heuristic multi-class rule learning method that can handle complex tabular datasets without relying too much on cumbersome preprocessing techniques. We abstract the training process of the classifier into a multi-objective optimization problem and design a novel hybrid evolutionary algorithm to obtain Pareto-optimal solutions as rule-based classifier. Compared with the existing explainable classification methods, this method has obvious advantages in the classification performance of tabular data.