Utility vs Usability: Towards a Search for Balance in Subgroup Discovery Problems

In recent years, significant strides have been made in the field of subgroup discovery by proposing methods that extract subgroups faster and with high utility levels. However, while the most effective works extract subgroups with more complex descriptions that improve utility by maximizing the quality criterion, the question of the usability of the extracted patterns is central for their understanding and application in the field. In this paper, we focus on the SD-CEDI approach, known for identifying the most relevant subgroups, but which the description is based on discontinuous attribute intervals. In this work we propose, and study, various strategies designed to add usability to the extracted patterns and we thus highlight the dilemma between Utility and Usability, that can be seen as a balance to be struck between adding value and degrading quality.