BRACE: A Paradigm For the Discretization of Continuously Valued Data

Discretization of continuously valued data is a useful and necessary tool because many learning paradigms assume nominal data. A list of objectives for efficient and effective discretization is presented. A paradigm called BRACE (Boundary Ranking And Classification Evaluation) that attempts to meet the objectives is presented along with an algorithm that follows the paradigm. The paradigm meets many of the objectives, with potential for extension to meet the remainder. Empirical results have been promising. For these reasons BRACE has potential as an effective and efficient method for discretization of continuously valued data. A further advantage of BRACE is that it is general enough to be extended to other types of clustering/unsupervised learning.