Towards an Effective Cooperation of the Computer and the User for Classification

Decision trees have been successfully used for the task of classification. However, state-of-the-art algorithms do not incorporate the user in the tree construction process. This paper presents a new user-centered approach to this process where the user and the computer can both contribute their strengths: the user provides domain knowledge and evaluates intermediate results of the algorithm, the computer automatically creates patterns satisfying user constraints and generates appropriate visualizations of these patterns. In this cooperative approach, domain knowledge of the user can direct the search of the algorithm. Additionally, by providing adequate data and knowledge visualizations, the pattern recognition capabilities of the human can be used to increase the effectivity of decision tree construction. Furthermore, the user gets a deeper understanding of the decision tree than just obtaining it as a result of an algorithm. To achieve the intended level of cooperation, we introduce a new visualization of data with categorical and numerical attributes. A novel technique for visualizing decision trees is presented which provides deep insights into the process of decision tree construction. As a key contribution, we integrate a state-of-the-art algorithm for decision tree construction such that many different styles of cooperation ranging from completely manual over combined to completely automatic classification are supported. An experimental performance evaluation demonstrates that our cooperative approach yields an efficient construction of decision trees that have a small size, but a high accuracy.