Rule Extraction from Neural networks - a Comparative Study

Though neural networks have achieved highest classification accuracy for many classification problems, the obtained results may not be interpretable as they are often considered as black box. To overcome this drawback researchers have developed many rule extraction algorithms. This paper has discussed on various rule extraction algorithms based on three different rule extraction approaches namely decompositional, pedagogical and eclectic. Also it evaluates the performance of those approaches by comparing different algorithms with these three approaches on three real datasets namely Wisconsin breast cancer, Pima Indian diabetes and Iris plants. Keywords-classification; data mining; decompositional; pedagogical; eclectic; neural networks; rule extraction.