Direct Mining of Rules from Data with Missing Values

Summary. The paper presents an approach to and technique for direct mining of binary data with missing values aiming at extraction of classification rules, whose premises are represented in a conjunctive form. This approach does not assume an imputation of missing values. The idea is (1) to generate two sets of rules serving as the upper and low bounds for any other sets of rules corresponding to all arbitrary assignments of missing values, and then, (2) based on these upper and low bounds of the rules' sets, on testing procedure and on a classification criterion to select a subset of rules to be used for classification. The approach is primarily oriented to the application domains where an imputation is either cannot be theoretically justified or is impossible at all. Examples of such applications are given by domains where information used for classification is composed of asynchronous data streams of various frequencies and thus possessing different "life time", or such information is missing due to peculiarities of information collection system. Instead of missing value imputation, the proposed approach uses training dataset to cut down the potential rules set via forming its low and upper bounds with the subsequent testing the rules of the upper bound against the new dataset with missing values and selection of the most appropriate rules. The approach was applied to learning of intrusions detection in computer network based on asynchronous data streams incoming from multiple data sources. Experimental results confirm that the proposed approach to direct mining of data with missing values can yield good results.