Hyper-heuristic decision tree induction

Hyper-heuristics are increasingly used in function and combinatorial optimization. Rather than attempt to solve a problem using a fixed heuristic, a hyper-heuristic approach attempts to find a combination of heuristics that solve a problem (and in turn may be directly suitable for a class of problem instances). Hyper-heuristics have been little explored in data mining. Here we apply a hyper-heuristic approach to data mining, by searching a space of decision tree induction algorithms. The result of hyper-heuristic search in this case is a new decision tree induction algorithm. We show that hyper-heuristic search over a space of decision tree induction algorithms can find decision tree induction algorithms that outperform many different version of ID3 on unseen test sets.