A Lazy Approach to Pruning Classification Rules Elena Baralis and Paolo Garza   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Main-Track Regular Papers Abstract Associative classification is a promising technique for the generation of highly precise classifiers. Previous works propose several clever techniques to prune the huge set of generated rules, with the twofold aim of selecting a small set of high quality rules, and reducing the chance of overfitting. In this paper, we argue that pruning should be reduced to a minimum and that the availability of a large rule base may improve the precision of the classifier, without affecting its performance. In L3 (Live and Let Live), a new algorithm for associative classification, a lazy pruning technique iteratively discards all rules that only yield wrong case classifications. Classification is performed in two steps. Initially, rules which have already correctly classified at least one training case, sorted by confidence, are considered. If the case is still unclassified, the remaining rules (unused during the training phase) are considered, again sorted by confidence. Extensive experiments on 26 databases from the UCI machine learning database repository show that L3 improves the classification precision with respect to previous approaches. DiSC'03 © 2003 Association for Computing Machinery