Logical Analysis of Data

The main objective of this paper is to compare the classification accuracy provided large, comprehensive collections of patterns (rules) derived from archives of past observations, with that provided by small, comprehensible collections of patterns. This comparison is carried out here on the basis of an empirical study, using several publicly available datasets. The results of this study show that the use of comprehensive collections allows a slight increase of classification accuracy, and that the “cost of comprehensibility” is small. Acknowledgements: We gratefully acknowledge the support from the Office of Naval Research (Grant N00014-92-J-1375) and DIMACS which made this study possible.