Rule extraction from trained adaptive neural networks using artificial immune systems

Although artificial neural network (ANN) usually reaches high classification accuracy, the obtained results sometimes may be incomprehensible. This fact is causing a serious problem in data mining applications. The rules that are derived from ANN are needed to be formed to solve this problem and various methods have been improved to extract these rules.Activation function is critical as the behavior and performance of an ANN model largely depends on it. So far there have been limited studies with emphasis on setting a few free parameters in the neuron activation function. ANN’s with such activation function seem to provide better fitting properties than classical architectures with fixed activation function neurons [Xu, S., & Zhang, M. (2005). Data mining – An adaptive neural network model for financial analysis. In Proceedings of the third international conference on information technology and applications].In this study a new method that uses artificial immune systems (AIS) algorithm has been presented to extract rules from trained adaptive neural network. Two real time problems data were investigated for determining applicability of the proposed method. The data were obtained from University of California at Irvine (UCI) machine learning repository. The datasets were obtained from Breast Cancer disease and ECG data. The proposed method achieved accuracy values 94.59% and 92.31% for ECG and Breast Cancer dataset, respectively. It has been observed that these results are one of the best results comparing with results obtained from related previous studies and reported in UCI web sites.