This class implements a propositional rule learner*, Repeated Incremental Pruning to Produce Error Reduction (RIPPER), which was proposed by William W. Cohen as an optimized version of IREP. The algorithm is briefly described as follows: Initialize RS = {}, and for each class from the less prevalent one to the more frequent one, DO: 1. Building stage: Repeat 1.1 and 1.2 until the descrition length (DL) of the ruleset and examples is 64 bits greater than the smallest DL met so far, or there are no positive examples, or the error rate >= 50%. 1.1. Grow phase: Grow one rule by greedily adding antecedents (or conditions) to the rule until the rule is perfect (i.e. 100% accurate). The procedure tries every possible value of each attribute and selects the condition with highest information gain: p(log(p/t)-log(P/T)). 1.2. Prune phase: Incrementally prune each rule and allow the pruning of any final sequences of the antecedents;The pruning metric is (p-n)/(p+n) -- but it's actually 2p/(p+n) -1, so in this implementation we simply use p/(p+n) (actually (p+1)/(p+n+2), thus if p+n is 0, it's 0.5). 2. Optimization stage: after generating the initial ruleset {Ri}, generate and prune two variants of each rule Ri from randomized data using procedure 1.1 and 1.2. But one variant is generated from an empty rule while the other is generated by greedily adding antecedents to the original rule. Moreover, the pruning metric used here is (TP+TN)/(P+N).Then the smallest possible DL for each variant and the original rule is computed. The variant with the minimal DL is selected as the final representative of Ri in the ruleset.After all the rules in {Ri} have been examined and if there are still residual positives, more rules are generated based on the residual positives using Building Stage again. 3. Delete the rules from the ruleset that would increase the DL of the whole ruleset if it were in it. and add resultant ruleset to RS. ENDDO Note that there seem to be 2 bugs in the original ripper program that would affect the ruleset size and accuracy slightly. This implementation avoids these bugs and thus is a little bit different from Cohen's original implementation. Even after fixing the bugs, since the order of classes with the same frequency is not defined in ripper, there still seems to be some trivial difference between this implementation and the original ripper, especially for audiology data in UCI repository, where there are lots of classes of few instances. Details please see: William W. Cohen: Fast Effective Rule Induction. In: Twelfth International Conference on Machine Learning, 115-123, 1995. PS. We have compared this implementation with the original ripper implementation in aspects of accuracy, ruleset size and running time on both artificial data "ab+bcd+defg" and UCI datasets. In all these aspects it seems to be quite comparable to the original ripper implementation. However, we didn't consider memory consumption optimization in this implementation.
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