Associative classification is a pattern recognition approach that integrates classification and association rule discovery to build accurate classification models. These models are formed by a collection of contrast patterns that fulfill some restrictions. In this paper, we introduce an experimental comparison of the impact of using different restrictions in the classification accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such analysis is performed, deriving some interesting findings about how restrictions impact on the classification results. Contrasting these results with previously published papers, we found that their conclusions could be unintentionally biased by the restrictions they used. We found, for example, that the jumping restriction could severely damage the pattern quality in the presence of dataset noise. We also found that the minimal support restriction has a different effect in the accuracy of two associative classifiers, therefore deciding which one is the best depends on the support value. This paper opens some interesting lines of research, mainly in the creation of new restrictions and new pattern types by joining different restrictions.

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