Using Logical Decision Trees for Clustering

A novel first order clustering system, called C 0.5, is presented. It inherits its logical decision tree formalism from the TILDE system, but instead of using class information to guide the search, it employs the principles of instance based learning in order to perform clustering. Various experiments are discussed, which show the promise of the approach. 1 Introduction A decision tree is usually seen as representing a theory for classification of examples. If the examples are positive and negative examples for one specific concept, then the tree defines these two concepts. One could also say, if there are k classes, that the tree defines k concepts. Another viewpoint is taken in Langley's Elements of Machine Learning [Langley, 1996]. Langley sees decision tree induction as a special case of the induction of concept hierarchies. A concept is associated with each node of the tree, and as such the tree represents a kind of taxonomy, a hierarchy of many concepts. This is very similar to ..