Extracting comprehensible rules from neural networks via genetic algorithms

A common problem in KDD (Knowledge Discovery in Databases) is the presence of noise in the data being mined. Neural networks are robust and have a good tolerance to noise, which makes them suitable for mining very noisy data. However, they have the well-known disadvantage of not discovering any high-level rule that can be used as a support for human decision making. In this work we present a method for extracting accurate, comprehensible rules from neural networks. The proposed method uses a genetic algorithm to find a good neural network topology. This topology is then passed to a rule extraction algorithm, and the quality of the extracted rules is then fed back to the genetic algorithm. The proposed system is evaluated on three public-domain data sets and the results show that the approach is valid.