Multi-Interval Discretization of Continuous-Valued Attributes for Classification Learning

Fayyad, Usama M.; Irani, Keki B.

Multi-Interval Discretization of Continuous-Valued Attributes for Classification Learning

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Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Machine Learning. Pages 1022-1028.

Abstract

Since most real-world applications of classification learning involve continuous-valued attributes, properly addressing the discretization process is an important problem. This paper addresses the use of the entropy minimization heuristic for discretizing the range of a continuous-valued attribute into multiple intervals. We briefly present theoretical evidence for the appropriateness of this heuristic for use in the binary discretization algorithm used in 103, C4, CART, and other learning algorithms. The results serve to justify extending the algorithm to derive multiple intervals. We formally derive a criterion based on the minimum description length principle for deciding the partitioning of intervals. We demonstrate via empirical evaluation on several real-world data sets that better decision trees are obtained using the new multi-interval algorithm.

Usama M. Fayyad, and Keki B. Irani. 1993. Multi-Interval Discretization of Continuous-Valued Attributes for Classification Learning. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-93. IJCAI, 1022–1028. https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1993/141

@inproceedings{ijcai1993p141,
  title     = {Multi-Interval Discretization of Continuous-Valued Attributes for Classification Learning},
  author    = {Fayyad, Usama M. and Irani, Keki B.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Joint Conference on
               Artificial Intelligence, {IJCAI-93}},
  publisher = {International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence},
  editor    = {Ruzena Bajcsy},
  pages     = {1022--1028},
  year      = {1993},
  note      = {Machine Learning},
  url       = {https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1993/141},
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Multi-Interval Discretization of Continuous-Valued Attributes for Classification Learning
AU  - Fayyad, Usama M.
AU  - Irani, Keki B.
T2  - Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-93
PB  - International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence
PY  - 1993
SP  - 1022
EP  - 1028
UR  - https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1993/141
ER  -