Learning customized and optimized lists of rules with mathematical programming

Abstract We introduce a mathematical programming approach to building rule lists, which are a type of interpretable, nonlinear, and logical machine learning classifier involving IF-THEN rules. Unlike traditional decision tree algorithms like CART and C5.0, this method does not use gre...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Rudin, Cynthia, Ertekin, Şeyda
Other Authors: Sloan School of Management
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2021
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/131392
Description
Summary:Abstract We introduce a mathematical programming approach to building rule lists, which are a type of interpretable, nonlinear, and logical machine learning classifier involving IF-THEN rules. Unlike traditional decision tree algorithms like CART and C5.0, this method does not use greedy splitting and pruning. Instead, it aims to fully optimize a combination of accuracy and sparsity, obeying user-defined constraints. This method is useful for producing non-black-box predictive models, and has the benefit of a clear user-defined tradeoff between training accuracy and sparsity. The flexible framework of mathematical programming allows users to create customized models with a provable guarantee of optimality. The software reviewed as part of this submission was given the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1344142 .