Global Optimization in Learning with Important Data: an FCA-Based Approach

Nowadays decision tree learning is one of the most popular classification and regression techniques. Though decision trees are not accurate on their own, they make very good base learners for advanced tree-based methods such as random forests and gradient boosted trees. However, applying ensembles of trees deteriorates interpretability of the final model. Another problem is that decision tree learning can be seen as a greedy search for a good classification hypothesis in terms of some information-based criterion such as Gini impurity or information gain. But in case of small data sets the global search might be possible. In this paper, we propose an FCA-based lazy classification technique where each test instance is classified with a set of the best (in terms of some information-based criterion) rules. In a set of benchmarking experiments, the proposed strategy is compared with decision tree and nearest neighbor learning.