Selecting Among Rules Induced from a Hurricane Database

Real-World Applications

Rule induction can achieve orders of magnitude reduction in the volume of data descriptions. For example, we applied a commercial tool (IXLtin) to a 1,819 record tropical storm database, yielding 161 rules. However, the human comprehension goals of Knowledge Discovery in Databases may require still more orders of magnitude. We present a rule refinement strategy, partly implemented in a Prolog program, that operationalizes "interestingness" into performance, simplicity, novelty, and significance. Applying the strategy to the induced rulebase yielded 10 "genuinely interesting" rules.