While machine-learning models are flourishing and transforming many aspects of everyday life, the inability of humans to understand complex models poses difficulties for these models to be fully trusted and embraced. Thus, interpretability of models has been recognized as an equally important quality as their predictive power. In particular, rule-based systems are experiencing a renaissance owing to their intuitive if-then representation. However, simply being rule-based does not ensure interpretability. For example, overlapped rules spawn ambiguity and hinder interpretation. Here we propose a novel approach of inferring diverse rule sets, by optimizing small overlap among decision rules with a 2-approximation guarantee under the framework of Max-Sum diversification. We formulate the problem as maximizing a weighted sum of discriminative quality and diversity of a rule set. In order to overcome an exponential-size search space of association rules, we investigate several natural options for a small candidate set of high-quality rules, including frequent and accurate rules, and examine their hardness. Leveraging the special structure in our formulation, we then devise an efficient randomized algorithm, which samples rules that are highly discriminative and have small overlap. The proposed sampling algorithm analytically targets a distribution of rules that is tailored to our objective. We demonstrate the superior predictive power and interpretability of our model with a comprehensive empirical study against strong baselines.

该研究提出了一种新方法来推断不同的规则集，通过在Max-Sum多样化框架下优化决策规则之间的小重叠，以及在鉴别品质和规则集多样性之间最大化加权总和，来克服联想规则指数级搜索空间的困难。该算法通过随机采样高度鉴别且重叠小的规则，并证明其拥有更好的预测能力和解释性。

多样化的规则集