Contrast sets have been shown to be a useful tool for describing differences between groups. A contrast set is a set of association rules for which the antecedents de- scribe distinct groups, a common consequent is shared by all the rules, and support for the rules is significantly dif- ferent between groups. While techniques for generating contrast sets containing categorical attributes in the con- sequent are "straightforward", techniques for generating contrast sets containing continuous-valued attributes are not. In this paper, we describe a technique for generat- ing contrast sets describing the differences between two groups, where the consequent in the rules contains up to two continuous-valued attributes. We propose a modified equal- width binning interval approach to discretizing continuous- valued attributes, where the approximate width of the de- sired intervals is provided as a parameter to the model. We also propose an objective measure for identifying and rank- ing the potentially interesting contrast sets. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and the utility of the interest measure.
Citation:
Mondelle Simeon, Robert J. Hilderman, "Exploratory Quantitative Contrast Set Mining: A Discretization Approach," ictai, vol. 2, pp.124-131, 19th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence - Vol.2 (ICTAI 2007), 2007