We explore the structure of non-redundant and minimal sets consisting of graded if-then rules. The rules serve as graded attribute implications in object-attribute incidence data and as similarity-based functional dependencies in a similarity-based generalization of the relational model of data. Based on our observations, we derive a polynomial-time algorithm which transforms a given finite set of rules into an equivalent one which has the least size in terms of the number of rules.

Today, people benefit from utilizing data mining technologies, such as association rule mining methods, to find valuable knowledge residing in a large amount of data. However, they also face the risk of exposing sensitive or confidential information, when data is shared among different organizations. Thus, a question arise: how can we prevent that sensitive knowledge is discovered, while ensuring that ordinary non-sensitive knowledge can be mined to the maximum extent possible. In this paper, we address the problem of privacy preserving in association rule mining from the perspective of multi-objective optimization. A new hiding method based evolutionary multi-objective optimization (EMO) is proposed and the side effects generated by the hiding process are formulated as optimization goals. EMO is used to find candidate transactions to modify so that side effects are minimized. Comparative experiments with exact methods on real datasets demonstrated that the proposed method can hide sensitive rules with fewer side effects.

This paper presents a planning technique in which a flawed set of reactive rules is used to guide a stochastic forward-chaining search. A planner based on this technique is shown to perform well on Blocks World problems. But the attraction of the technique is not only its high performance as a straight planner, but also its anytime capability. Using a more dynamic domain, the performance of a resource-bounded version of the planner is shown to degrade gracefully as computational resources are reduced.

Cause-effect relations are an important part of human knowledge. In real life, humans often reason about complex causes linked to complex effects. By comparison, existing formalisms for representing knowledge about causal relations are quite limited in the kind of specifications of causes and effects they allow. In this paper, we present the new language C-Log, which offers a significantly more expressive representation of effects, including such features as the creation of new objects. We show how C-Log integrates with first-order logic, resulting in the language FO(C). We also compare FO(C) with several related languages and paradigms, including inductive definitions, disjunctive logic programming, business rules and extensions of Datalog.

The increasing demand of world wide web raises the need of predicting the user's web page request.The most widely used approach to predict the web pages is the pattern discovery process of Web usage mining. This process involves inevitability of many techniques like Markov model, association rules and clustering. Fuzzy theory with different techniques has been introduced for the better results. Our focus is on Markov models. This paper is introducing the vague Rules with Markov models for more accuracy using the vague set theory.

Learning rules is a common way of extracting usefulinformation from knowledge or data bases. Many ofsuch data sets contain numerical attributes. However,approaches like ILP or association rule mining are optimizedfor data with categorical values, and consideringnumerical attributes is expensive. In this paper,we present an extension to the top-down ILP algorithm,which enables an efficient discovery of datalogrules from data with both numerical and categorical attributes.Our approach comprises a preprocessing phasefor computing the correlations between numerical andcategorical attributes, as well as an extension to the ILPrefinement step, which enables us to detect interestingcandidate rules and to suggest refinements with relevantattribute combinations. We report on experiments withU.S. Census data, Freebase and DBpedia, and show thatour approach helps to efficiently discover rules with numericalintervals.

There is an increasing interest for valence and emotion sensing using a variety of signals. Text, as a communication channel, gathers a substantial amount of interest for recognizing its underlying sentiment (valence or polarity), affect or emotion (e.g. happy, sadness). We consider recognizing the valence of a sentence as a prior task to emotion sensing. In this article, we discuss our approach to classify sentences in terms of emotional valence. Our supervised system performs syntactic and semantic analysis for feature extraction. It processes the interactions between words in sentences by using dependency parse trees, and it can decide the current polarity of named-entities based on on-the-fly topic modeling. We compared 3 rule-based approaches and two supervised approaches (i.e. Naive Bayes and Maximum Entropy). We trained and tested our system using the SemEval-2007 affective text dataset, which contains news headlines extracted from news websites. Our results show that our systems outperform the systems demonstrated in SemEval-2007.

Pattern classification algorithms have been applied in data mining and signal processing to extract the knowledge from data in a wide range of applications. The Fuzzy inference systems have successfully been used to extract rules in rule-based applications. In this paper, a novel hybrid methodology using: (i) fuzzy logic (in form of if-then rules) and (ii) a bio-inspired optimization technique (firefly algorithm) is proposed to improve performance and accuracy of classification task. Experiments are done using nine standard data sets in UCI machine learning repository. The results show that overall the accuracy and performance of our classification are better or very competitive compared to others reported in literature.

Inappropriate prescribing of antimicrobials is a major clinical concern that affects as many as 50 percent of prescriptions. One of the difficulties of antimicrobial prescribing lies in the necessity to sequentially adjust the treatment of a patient as new clinical data become available. The lack of specialized healthcare resources and the overwhelming amount of information to process make manual surveillance unsustainable. To solve this problem, we have developed and deployed an automated antimicrobial prescription surveillance system that assists hospital pharmacists in identifying and reporting inappropriate prescriptions. Since its deployment, the system has improved antimicrobial prescribing and decreased antimicrobial use. However, the highly sensitive knowledge base used by the system leads to many false alerts. As a remedy, we are developing a machine learning algorithm that combines instance-based learning and rule induction techniques to discover new rules for detecting inappropriate prescriptions from previous false alerts. In this article, we describe the system, point to results and lessons learned so far and provide insight into the machine learning capability.

The inherent nature of social media content poses serious challenges to practical applications of sentiment analysis. We present VADER, a simple rule-based model for general sentiment analysis, and compare its effectiveness to eleven typical state-of-practice benchmarks including LIWC, ANEW, the General Inquirer, SentiWordNet, and machine learning oriented techniques relying on Naive Bayes, Maximum Entropy, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, we first construct and empirically validate a gold-standard list of lexical features (along with their associated sentiment intensity measures) which are specifically attuned to sentiment in microblog-like contexts. We then combine these lexical features with consideration for five general rules that embody grammatical and syntactical conventions for expressing and emphasizing sentiment intensity. Interestingly, using our parsimonious rule-based model to assess the sentiment of tweets, we find that VADER outperforms individual human raters (F1 Classification Accuracy = 0.96 and 0.84, respectively), and generalizes more favorably across contexts than any of our benchmarks.