Skip to main content

Inducing decision trees with an ant colony optimization algorithm

Otero, Fernando E.B., Freitas, Alex A., Johnson, Colin G. (2012) Inducing decision trees with an ant colony optimization algorithm. Applied Soft Computing, 12 (11). pp. 3615-3626. ISSN 1568-4946. (doi:10.1016/j.asoc.2012.05.028) (KAR id:30832)

Abstract

Decision trees have been widely used in data mining and machine learning as a comprehensible knowledge representation. While ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms have been successfully applied to extract classification rules, decision tree induction with ACO algorithms remains an almost unexplored research area. In this paper we propose a novel ACO algorithm to induce decision trees, combining commonly used strategies from both traditional decision tree induction algorithms and ACO. The proposed algorithm is compared against three decision tree induction algorithms, namely C4.5, CART and cACDT, in 22 publicly available data sets. The results show that the predictive accuracy of the proposed algorithm is statistically significantly higher than the accuracy of both C4.5 and CART, which are well-known conventional algorithms for decision tree induction, and the accuracy of the ACO-based cACDT decision tree algorithm.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1016/j.asoc.2012.05.028
Uncontrolled keywords: data mining, classification, swarm intelligence
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics (inc Computing science) > QA 76 Software, computer programming,
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences > School of Computing
Depositing User: Fernando Otero
Date Deposited: 21 Sep 2012 09:49 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 10:08 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/30832 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

  • Depositors only (login required):

Total unique views for this document in KAR since July 2020. For more details click on the image.