A Distance-Based Approach for Action Recommendation

Rule induction has attracted a great deal of attention in Machine Learning and Data Mining. However, generating rules is not an end in itself because their applicability is not so straightforward. Indeed, the user is often overwhelmed when faced with a large number of rules. In this paper, we propose an approach to lighten this burden when the user wishes to exploit such rules to decide which actions to do given an unsatisfactory situation. The method consists in comparing a situation to a set of classification rules. This is achieved using a suitable distance thus allowing to suggest action recommendations with minimal changes to improve that situation. We propose the algorithm Dakar for learning action recommendations and we present an application to an environmental protection issue. Our experiment shows the usefulness of our contribution in decision-making but also raises concerns about the impact of the redundancy of a set of rules in learning action recommendations of quality.