Rules are commonly used for classification because they are modular, intelligible and easy to learn. Existing work in classification
rule learning assumes the goal is to produce categorical classifications to maximize classification accuracy. Recent work
in machine learning has pointed out the limitations of classification accuracy: when class distributions are skewed, or error
costs are unequal, an accuracy maximizing classifier can perform poorly. This paper presents a method for learning rules directly
from ROC space when the goal is to maximize the area under the ROC curve (AUC). Basic principles from rule learning and computational
geometry are used to focus the search for promising rule combinations. The result is a system that can learn intelligible
rulelists with good ROC performance.
Keywords Classification - ROC analysis - Rule learning - Cost-sensitive learning
Responsible editor: Bianca Zadrozny.