Rule Extraction : Where Do We Go from Here ?

We argue that despite being an actively researched area for nearly a decade, rule-extraction technology has not made as signiicant of an impact as it should have. A connuence of trends, however, has made the ability to extract comprehensible descriptions from complex learned models more important now than ever. We argue that rule-extraction methods can have a signii-cant impact in the overlapping data-mining, machine-learning and neural-network communities if research is focused on several commonly overlooked issues. We then brieey describe how we have tried to address these issues in our own work.