Rule-based classification is considered an important task of data classification. The ant-mining rule-based classification algorithm, inspired from the ant colony optimization algorithm, shows a comparable performance and outperforms in some application domains to the existing methods in the literature. One problem that often arises in any rule-based classification is the overfitting problem. Rule pruning is a framework to avoid overfitting. Furthermore, we find that the influence of rule pruning in ant-miner classification algorithms is equivalent to that of local search in stochastic methods when they aim to search for more improvement for each candidate solution. In this paper, we review the history of the pruning techniques in ant-miner and its variants. These techniques are classified into post-pruning, pre-pruning and hybrid-pruning. In addition, we compare and analyse the advantages and disadvantages of these methods. Finally, future research direction to find new hybrid rule pruning techniques are provided.

In this study, a hybrid rule-based classifier namely, ant colony optimization/genetic algorithm ACO/GA is introduced to improve the classification accuracy of Ant-Miner classifier by using GA. The Ant-Miner classifier is efficient, useful and commonly used for solving rulebased classification problems in data mining. Ant-Miner, which is an ACO variant, suffers from local optimization problem which affects its performance. In our proposed hybrid ACO/GA algorithm, the ACO is responsible for generating classification rules and the GA improves the classification rules iteratively using the principles of multi-neighborhood structure (i.e., mutation and crossover) procedures to overcome the local optima problem. The performance of the proposed classifier was tested against other existing hybrid ant-mining classification algorithms namely, ACO/SA and ACO/PSO2 using classification accuracy, the number of discovered rules and model complexity. For the experiment, the 10-fold cross-validation procedure was used on 12 benchmark datasets from the University California Irwine machine learning repository. Experimental results show that the proposed hybridization was able to produce impressive results in all evaluation criteria.

Data-intensive science is a critical science paradigm that interferes with all other sciences. Data mining (DM) is a powerful and useful technology with wide potential users focusing on important meaningful patterns and discovers a new knowledge from a collected dataset. Any predictive task in DM uses some attribute to classify an unknown class. Classification algorithms are a class of prominent mathematical techniques in DM. Constructing a model is the core aspect of such algorithms. However, their performance highly depends on the algorithm behavior upon manipulating data. Focusing on binarazaition as an approach for preprocessing, this paper analysis and evaluates different classification algorithms when construct a model based on accuracy in the classification task. The Mixed National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST) handwritten digits dataset provided by Yann LeCun has been used in evaluation. The paper focuses on machine learning approaches for handwritten digits detection. Machine learning establishes classification methods, such as K-Nearest Neighbor(KNN), Decision Tree (DT), and Neural Networks (NN). Results showed that the knowledge-based method, i.e. NN algorithm, is more accurate in determining the digits as it reduces the error rate. The implication of this evaluation is providing essential insights for computer scientists and practitioners for choosing the suitable DM technique that fit with their data.

<span>Ant colony optimization (ACO) was successfully applied to data mining classification task through ant-mining algorithms. Exploration and exploitation are search strategies that guide the learning process of a classification model and generate a list of rules. Exploitation refers to the process of intensifying the search for neighbors in good regions, </span><span>whereas exploration aims towards new promising regions during a search process. </span><span>The existing balance between exploration and exploitation in the rule construction procedure is limited to the roulette wheel selection mechanism, which complicates rule generation. Thus, low-coverage complex rules with irrelevant terms will be generated. This work proposes an enhancement rule pruning procedure for the ACO algorithm that can be used in rule-based classification. This procedure, called the annealing strategy, is an improvement of ant-mining algorithms in the rule construction procedure. Presented as a pre-pruning technique, the annealing strategy deals first with irrelevant terms before creating a complete rule through an annealing schedule. The proposed improvement was tested through benchmarking experiments, and results were compared with those of four of the most related ant-mining algorithms, namely, Ant-Miner, CAnt-Miner, TACO-Miner, and Ant-Miner with hybrid pruner. </span><span>Results display that our proposed technique achieves better performance in terms of classification accuracy, model size, and </span><span>computational time. </span><span>The proposed annealing schedule can be used in other ACO variants for different applications to improve classification accuracy.</span>

Intelligent Hypothermia Care System (IHCS) is an intelligence system uses set of methodologies, algorithms, architectures and processes to determine where patients in a postoperative recovery area must be sent. Hypothermia is a significant concern after surgery. This paper utilizes the classification task in data mining to propose an intelligent technique to predict where to send a patient after surgery: intensive care unit, general floor or home. To achieve this goal, this paper evaluates the performance of decision tree algorithm, exemplifying the deterministic approach, against the AntMiner algorithm, exemplifying the heuristic approach, to choose the best approach in detecting the patient’s status. Results show the outperformance of the heuristic approach. The implication of this proposal will be twofold: in hypothermia treatment and in the application of ant colony optimization