Ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms for classification in general employ a sequential covering strategy to create a list of classification rules. A key component in this strategy is the selection of the rule quality function, since the algorithm aims at creating one rule at a time using an ACObased procedure to search the best rule. Recently, an improved strategy has been proposed in the cAnt-MinerPB algorithm, where an ACO-based procedure is used to create a complete list of rules instead of individual rules. In the cAntMinerPB algorithm, the rule quality function has a smaller role and the search is guided by the quality of a list of rules. This paper sets out to determine the effect of different rule and list quality functions in terms of both predictive accuracy and size of the discovered model in cAnt-MinerPB. The comparative analysis is performed using 12 data sets from the UCI Machine Learning repository and shows that the effect of the rule quality functions in cAnt-MinerPB is different from the results previously presented in the literature.

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