Actionable Rules: Issues and New Directions

Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) is the process of extracting previously unknown, hidden and interesting patterns from a huge amount of data stored in databases. Data mining is a stage of the KDD process that aims at selecting and applying a particular data mining algorithm to extract an interesting and useful knowledge. It is highly expected that data mining methods will find interesting patterns according to some measures, from databases. It is of vital importance to define good measures of interestingness that would allow the system to discover only the useful patterns. Measures of interestingness are divided into objective and subjective measures. Objective measures are those that depend only on the structure of a pattern and which can be quantified by using statistical methods. While, subjective measures depend only on the subjectivity and understandability of the user who examine the patterns. These subjective measures are further divided into actionable, unexpected and novel. The key issues that faces data mining community is how to make actions on the basis of discovered knowledge. For a pattern to be actionable, the user subjectivity is captured by providing his/her background knowledge about domain. Here, we consider the actionability of the discovered knowledge as a measure of interestingness and raise important issues which need to be addressed to discover actionable knowledge