Mohammad Azad – författare

The results presented here (including the assessment of a new tool – inhibitory trees) offer valuable tools for researchers in the areas of data mining, knowledge discovery, and machine learning, especially those whose work involves decision tables with many-valued decisions. The authors consider various examples of problems and corresponding decision tables with many-valued decisions, discuss the difference between decision and inhibitory trees and rules, and develop tools for their analysis and design. Applications include the study of totally optimal (optimal in relation to a number of criteria simultaneously) decision and inhibitory trees and rules; the comparison of greedy heuristics for tree and rule construction as single-criterion and bi-criteria optimization algorithms; and the development of a restricted multi-pruning approach used in classification and knowledge representation.

In this book, the concept of a hypothesis about the values of all attributes is added to the standard decision tree model, considered, in particular, in test theory and rough set theory. This extension allows us to use the analog of equivalence queries from exact learning and explore decision trees that are based on various combinations of attributes, hypotheses, and proper hypotheses (analog of proper equivalence queries). The two main goals of this book are (i) to provide tools for the experimental and theoretical study of decision trees with hypotheses and (ii) to compare these decision trees with conventional decision trees that use only queries, each based on a single attribute. 

Both experimental and theoretical results show that decision trees with hypotheses can have less complexity than conventional decision trees. These results open up some prospects for using decision trees with hypotheses as a means of knowledge representation and algorithms for computing Boolean functions. The obtained theoretical results and tools for studying decision trees with hypotheses are useful for researchers using decision trees and rules in data analysis. This book can also be used as the basis for graduate courses.