The best discretization is the one performed by an expert domain. Indeed, he takes into account other information than those only provided by the available dataset. Unfortunately, this kind of approach is not always feasible because: often, the domain knowledge is not available or it does not allow to determine the appropriate discretization; the process cannot be automated to handle a large number of attributes. So, we are often forced to found the determination of the best discretization on a numerical process.
Discretization of continuous features as preprocessing for supervised learning process. First, we must define the context in which we perform the transformation. Depending on the circumstances, it is clear that the process and criteria used will not be the same. In this tutorial, we are in the supervised learning framework. We perform the discretization prior to the learning process i.e. we transform the continuous predictive attributes into discrete before to present them to a supervised learning algorithm. In this context, the construction of intervals in which one and only one of the values of the target attribute is the most represented is desirable. The relevance of the computed solution is often evaluated through an impurity based or an entropy based functions.
In this tutorial, we use only the univariate approaches. We compare the behavior of the supervised and the unsupervised algorithms on an artificial dataset. We use several tools for that: Tanagra 1.4.35, Sipina 3.3, R 2.9.2 (package dprep), Weka 3.6.0, Knime 2.1.1, Orange 2.0b and RapidMiner 4.6.0. We highlight the settings of the algorithms and the reading of the results.
Keywords: mdlpc, discretization, supervised learning, equal frequency intervals, equal width intervals
Components: MDLPC, Supervised Learning, Decision List
Tutorial: en_Tanagra_Discretization_for_Supervised_Learning.pdf
Dataset: data-discretization.arff
References :
F. Muhlenbach, R. Rakotomalala, « Discretization of Continuous Attributes », in Encyclopedia of Data Warehousing and Mining, John Wang (Ed.), pp. 397-402, 2005 (http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00383757/fr/).
Tanagra Tutorial, "Discretization and Naive Bayes Classifier"
