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Main Authors: Xu, Sascha, Walter, Nils Philipp, Vreeken, Jilles
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.06428
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author Xu, Sascha
Walter, Nils Philipp
Vreeken, Jilles
author_facet Xu, Sascha
Walter, Nils Philipp
Vreeken, Jilles
contents Machine learning models deployed in sensitive areas such as healthcare must be interpretable to ensure accountability and fairness. Rule lists (if Age < 35 $\wedge$ Priors > 0 then Recidivism = True, else if Next Condition . . . ) offer full transparency, making them well-suited for high-stakes decisions. However, learning such rule lists presents significant challenges. Existing methods based on combinatorial optimization require feature pre-discretization and impose restrictions on rule size. Neuro-symbolic methods use more scalable continuous optimization yet place similar pre-discretization constraints and suffer from unstable optimization. To address the existing limitations, we introduce NeuRules, an end-to-end trainable model that unifies discretization, rule learning, and rule order into a single differentiable framework. We formulate a continuous relaxation of the rule list learning problem that converges to a strict rule list through temperature annealing. NeuRules learns both the discretizations of individual features, as well as their combination into conjunctive rules without any pre-processing or restrictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NeuRules consistently outperforms both combinatorial and neuro-symbolic methods, effectively learning simple and complex rules, as well as their order, across a wide range of datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_06428
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Neuro-Symbolic Rule Lists
Xu, Sascha
Walter, Nils Philipp
Vreeken, Jilles
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Machine learning models deployed in sensitive areas such as healthcare must be interpretable to ensure accountability and fairness. Rule lists (if Age < 35 $\wedge$ Priors > 0 then Recidivism = True, else if Next Condition . . . ) offer full transparency, making them well-suited for high-stakes decisions. However, learning such rule lists presents significant challenges. Existing methods based on combinatorial optimization require feature pre-discretization and impose restrictions on rule size. Neuro-symbolic methods use more scalable continuous optimization yet place similar pre-discretization constraints and suffer from unstable optimization. To address the existing limitations, we introduce NeuRules, an end-to-end trainable model that unifies discretization, rule learning, and rule order into a single differentiable framework. We formulate a continuous relaxation of the rule list learning problem that converges to a strict rule list through temperature annealing. NeuRules learns both the discretizations of individual features, as well as their combination into conjunctive rules without any pre-processing or restrictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NeuRules consistently outperforms both combinatorial and neuro-symbolic methods, effectively learning simple and complex rules, as well as their order, across a wide range of datasets.
title Neuro-Symbolic Rule Lists
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.06428