Integrating associative rule-based classification with Naïve Bayes for text classification

Associative classification (AC) integrates the task of mining association rules with the classification task to increase the efficiency of the classification process. AC algorithms produce accurate classification and generate easy to understand rules. However, AC algorithms suffer from two drawbacks: the large number of classification rules, and using different pruning methods that may remove vital information to achieve the right decision. In this paper, a new hybrid AC algorithm (HAC) is proposed. HAC applies the power of the Naïve Bayes (NB) algorithm to reduce the number of classification rules and to produce several rules that represent each attribute value. Two experiments are conducted on an Arabic textual dataset and the standard Reuters-21578 datasets using six different algorithms, namely J48, NB, classification based on associations (CBA), multi-class classification based on association rules (MCAR), expert multi-class classification based on association rules (EMCAR), and fast associative classification algorithm (FACA). The results of the experiments showed that the HAC approach produced higher classification accuracy than MCAR, CBA, EMCAR, FACA, J48 and NB with gains of 3.95%, 6.58%, 3.48%, 1.18%, 5.37% and 8.05% respectively. Furthermore, on Reuters-21578 datasets, the results indicated that the HAC algorithm has an excellent and stable performance in terms of classification accuracy and F measure.