Interpretable classifiers have recently witnessed an increase in attention
from the data mining community because they are inherently easier to understand
and explain than their more complex counterparts. Examples of interpretable
classification models include decision trees, rule sets, and rule lists.
Learning such models often involves optimizing hyperparameters, which typically
requires substantial amounts of data and may result in relatively large models.
In this paper, we consider the problem of learning compact yet accurate
probabilistic rule lists for multiclass classification. Specifically, we
propose a novel formalization based on probabilistic rule lists and the minimum
description length (MDL) principle. This results in virtually parameter-free
model selection that naturally allows to trade-off model complexity with
goodness of fit, by which overfitting and the need for hyperparameter tuning
are effectively avoided. Finally, we introduce the Classy algorithm, which
greedily finds rule lists according to the proposed criterion. We empirically
demonstrate that Classy selects small probabilistic rule lists that outperform
state-of-the-art classifiers when it comes to the combination of predictive
performance and interpretability. We show that Classy is insensitive to its
only parameter, i.e., the candidate set, and that compression on the training
set correlates with classification performance, validating our MDL-based
selection criterion.

本文介绍了一种基于概率规则列表和最小描述长度原则的模型选择方法，该方法可以在减小模型复杂度与保持良好拟合度之间进行折衷。同时，介绍了 Classy 算法，该算法针对多类别分类问题，选择小的概率规则列表，实现了良好的性能和可解释性。

基于 MDL 的规则列表的可解释多分类

Interpretable multiclass classification by MDL-based rule lists

There has been growing interest in developing accurate models that can also
be explained to humans. Unfortunately, if there exist multiple distinct but
accurate models for some dataset, current machine learning methods are unlikely
to find them: standard techniques will likely recover a complex model that
combines them. In this work, we introduce a way to identify a maximal set of
distinct but accurate models for a dataset. We demonstrate empirically that, in
situations where the data supports multiple accurate classifiers, we tend to
recover simpler, more interpretable classifiers rather than more complex ones.

本文提出了一种方法来识别数据集的最大不同但准确的模型，实验证明，当数据支持多个准确分类器时，我们往往会恢复更简单，更易解释的分类器而不是更复杂的模型。