title: Rule mining and classification in a situation assessment application: a belief-theoretic approach for handling data imperfections.
abstract: Management of data imprecision and uncertainty has become increasingly important, especially in situation awareness and assessment applications where reliability of the decision-making process is critical (e.g., in military battlefields). These applications require the following: 1) an effective methodology for modeling data imperfections and 2) procedures for enabling knowledge discovery and quantifying and propagating partial or incomplete knowledge throughout the decision-making process. In this paper, using a Dempster-Shafer belief-theoretic relational database (DS-DB) that can conveniently represent a wider class of data imperfections, an association rule mining (ARM)-based classification algorithm possessing the desirable functionality is proposed. For this purpose, various ARM-related notions are revisited so that they could be applied in the presence of data imperfections. A data structure called belief itemset tree is used to efficiently extract frequent itemsets and generate association rules from the proposed DS-DB. This set of rules is used as the basis on which an unknown data record, whose attributes are represented via belief functions, is classified. These algorithms are validated on a simplified situation assessment scenario where sensor observations may have caused data imperfections in both attribute values and class labels.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL 33124, USA. rohitha@miami.edu
authors.forename: K K
authors.initials: KK
authors.lastname: Rohitha
authors.forename: G K
authors.initials: GK
authors.lastname: Hewawasam
authors.forename: Kamal
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Premaratne
authors.forename: Mei-Ling
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Shyu
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003628:Database Management Systems; D016208:Databases, Factual; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D015233:Models, Statistical; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods*