Assessing quality of decision reducts

Abstract

The paper presents research focused on decision reducts, a feature reduction mechanism inherent to rough sets theory. As a reduct enables to protect the discriminative properties of attributes with respect to described concepts, from the point of data representation, a reduct length is considered to be the most important measure of its quality. However, such approach is insufficient while taking into account the performance of a reduct-based rule classifier applied to test samples. When many reducts of the same length are available, they can lead to vastly different predictions. The paper provides a description for the proposed procedure for iterative reduct generation, which results in decrease of diversity in the observed levels of accuracy, supporting reduct selection. The procedure was applied for binary classification with balanced classes, for the stylometric task of authorship attribution.