Noise Tolerance of EP-Based Classifiers

Emerging Pattern (EP)-based classifiers are a type of new classifiers based on itemsets whose occurrence in one dataset varies significantly from that of another. These classifiers are very promising and have shown to perform comparably with some popular classifiers. In this paper, we conduct two experiments to study the noise tolerance of EPbased classifiers. A primary concern is to ascertain if overfitting occurs in them. Our results highlight the fact that the aggregating approach in constructing EP-based classifiers prevents them from overfitting. We further conclude that perfect training accuracy does not necessarily lead to overfitting of a classifier as long as there exists a suitable mechanism, such as an aggregating approach, to counterbalance any propensity to overfit.