Autonomous Discovery of Reliable Exception Rules

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This paper presents an autonomous algorithm for discovering exception rules from data sets. An exception rule, which is defined as a deviational pattern to a well-known fact, exhibits unexpectedness and is sometimes extremely useful in spite of its obscurity. Previous discovery approaches for this type of knowledge have neglected the problem of evaluating the reliability of the rules extracted from a data set. It is clear, however, that this question is mandatory in distinguishing knowledge from unreliable patterns without annoying the users. In order to circumvent these difficulties we propose a probabilistic estimation approach in which we obtain an exception rule associated with a common sense rule in the form of a rule pair. Our approach discovers, based on the normal approximations of the multinomial distributions, rule pairs which satisfy, with high confidence, all the specified conditions. The time efficiency of the discovery process is improved by the newly-derived stopping criteria. PEDRE, which is a data mining system based on our approach, has been validated using the benchmark data sets in the machine learning community.