Rule mining and classification in a situation assessment application: a belief-theoretic approach for handling data imperfections

Management of data imprecision and uncertainty has become increasingly important, especially in situation awareness and assessment applications where reliability of the decision-making process is critical (e.g., in military battlefields). These applications require the following: 1) an effective methodology for modeling data imperfections and 2) procedures for enabling knowledge discovery and quantifying and propagating partial or incomplete knowledge throughout the decision-making process. In this paper, using a Dempster-Shafer belief-theoretic relational database (DS-DB) that can conveniently represent a wider class of data imperfections, an association rule mining (ARM)-based classification algorithm possessing the desirable functionality is proposed. For this purpose, various ARM-related notions are revisited so that they could be applied in the presence of data imperfections. A data structure called belief itemset tree is used to efficiently extract frequent itemsets and generate association rules from the proposed DS-DB. This set of rules is used as the basis on which an unknown data record, whose attributes are represented via belief functions, is classified. These algorithms are validated on a simplified situation assessment scenario where sensor observations may have caused data imperfections in both attribute values and class labels. Index Terms--Association rule mining (ARM), classification, data imperfections, Dempster-Shafer (DS) belief theory, situation assessment.