Automatic mining of accurate and comprehensible numerical classification rules with cat swarm optimization algorithm

Optimization is the process of finding the best solution of a problem. There are many optimization algorithms proposed for optimization problems. The metaheuristic algorithm can give solutions close to optimum in an acceptable period of time for large-scaled optimization problems. The metaheuristic optimization algorithms are evaluated in seven different groups which are biology-based, physics-based, swarm-based, social-based, music-based, sport-based, and chemistry-based. The swarm-based optimization algorithms have been developed by observing the behaviors of creatures e.g. birds, fishes, cats, bees etc. Data mining is the process of discovery of meaningful and useful data within huge databases. Classification rules mining is one of the most commonly studied data mining problems and with methods for this problem, users can easily understand the rules extracted from databases. In this work, one of the most recent swarm based optimization algorithm, Cat Swarm Optimization (CSO), has been firstly used for classification rules mining within databases composed of numerical or mixed data types automatically. There is not any preprocess for finding true ranges for appropriate attributes of the rules, this has been automatically done by CSO. Furthermore, the used objective function is very flexible and many different objectives can easily be added to. For this purpose, four numerical databases obtained from UCI data warehouse have been used and accurate and comprehensible classification rules have been mined. The results have been compared with the results obtained from Weka program. Although CSO has not been embedded with any improvement and has firstly implemented in this research area, the obtained results seem promising.