A transparent rule-based expert system using neural network

Abstract

Classification is one of the foremost machine learning tasks in this modern era. Neural Network (NN) is one of the powerful classification techniques. NN can achieve high classification accuracy on highly imbalanced and complex datasets, but lacks in explanation of its reasoning process which limits its applicability in various domains which require transparent decision along with good accuracy. There are some techniques which extract rules from NN and make it transparent; however, attribute pruning, rule pruning and class overlap algorithms are not sufficiently effective. Therefore, this paper proposes a rule extraction algorithm, called Transparent Rule Extraction using Neural Network (TRENN) to convert NN into white box with greater emphasis on attribute pruning and rule pruning. The proposed TRENN is a pedagogical approach and an extension of one of the existing algorithms named Rule Extraction from Neural Network using Classified and Misclassified data (RxNCM). The proposed TRENN extends the RxNCM with sequential floating backward search for feature and rule selection to improve the comprehensibility of the generated rules. Besides, the proposed TRENN uses probabilistic approach for the treatment of class overlapping problem in the rule updating phase instead of reclassification used in RxNCM where the overlap may persist. Experiments are conducted with eight real datasets collected from the UCI repository. Performance of the TRENN is measured with Precision, Recall, FP-Rate, F-measure, and local and global comprehensibility. It is observed from the experimental results that TRENN performs better than Re-RX, RxNCM and RxREN.