Data‐based Acquisition and Incremental Modification of Classification Rules

One of the most important problems in the application of knowledge discovery systems is the identification and subsequent updating of rules. Many applications require that the classification rules be derived from data representing exemplar occurrences of data patterns belonging to different classes. The problem of identifying such rules in data has been researched within the field of machine learning, and more recently in the context of rough set theory and knowledge discovery in databases. In this paper we present an incremental methodology for finding all maximally generalized rules and for adaptive modification of them when new data become available. The methodology is developed in the context of rough set theory and is based on the earlier idea of discernibility matrix introduced by Skowron.