Searching for the optimal ordering of classes in rule induction

Rule induction algorithms such as Ripper, solve a K > 2 class problem by converting it into a sequence of K - 1 two-class problems. As a usual heuristic, the classes are fed into the algorithm in the order of increasing prior probabilities. In this paper, we propose two algorithms to improve this heuristic. The first algorithm starts with the ordering the heuristic provides and searches for better orderings by swapping consecutive classes. The second algorithm transforms the ordering search problem into an optimization problem and uses the solution of the optimization problem to extract the optimal ordering. We compared our algorithms with the original Ripper on 8 datasets from UCI repository [2]. Simulation results show that our algorithms produce rulesets that are significantly better than those produced by Ripper proper.