Constructing ensembles of symbolic classifiers

Learning algorithms are an integral part of the data mining (DM) process. However, DM deals with a large amount of data and most learning algorithms do not operate in massive datasets. A technique often used to ease this problem is related to data sampling and the construction of ensembles of classifiers. Several methods to construct such ensembles have been proposed. However, these methods often lack an explanation facility. This paper proposes methods to construct ensembles of symbolic classifiers. These ensembles can be further explored in order to explain their decisions to the user. These methods were implemented in the ELE system, also described in this work. Experimental results in two out of three datasets show improvement over all base-classifiers. Moreover, according to the obtained results, methods based on single rule classification might be used to improve the explanation facility of ensembles.