A Grammar-Guided Genetic Programing Algorithm for Associative Classification in Big Data

The state-of-the-art in associative classification includes interesting approaches for building accurate and interpretable classifiers. These approaches generally work on four different phases (data discretization, pattern mining, rule mining, and classifier building), some of them being computational expensive. The aim of this work is to propose a novel evolutionary algorithm for efficiently building associative classifiers in Big Data. The proposed model works in only two phases (a grammar-guided genetic programming framework is performed in each phase): (1) mining reliable association rules; (2) building an accurate classifier by ranking and combining the previously mined rules. The proposal has been implemented on different architectures (multi-thread, Apache Spark and Apache Flink) to take advantage of the distributed computing. The experimental results have been obtained on 40 well-known datasets and analyzed through non-parametric tests. Results were compared to multiple approaches in the field and analyzed on three ways: quality of the predictions, level of interpretability, and efficiency. The proposed method obtained accurate and interpretable classifiers in an efficient way even on high-dimensional data, outperforming the state-of-the-art algorithms on three different levels: quality of the predictions, interpretability, and efficiency.