Afify, "Online Discretization of Continuous-Valued Attributes in Rule Induction

Abstract: Machine learning algorithms designed for engineering applications must be able to handle numerical attributes, particularly attributes with real (or continuous) values. Many algorithms deal with continuous-valued attributes by discretizing them before starting the learning process. This paper describes a new approach for discretization of continuous-valued attributes during the learning process. Incorporating discretization within the learning process has the advantage of taking into account the bias inherent in the learning system as well as the interactions between the different attributes. Experiments have demonstrated that the proposed method, when used in conjunction with the SRI rule induction algorithm developed by the authors, improves the accuracy of the induced model