Extracting the knowledge embedded in support vector machines

One of the main challenges in support vector machine (SVM) for data mining applications is to obtain explicit knowledge from the solutions of SVM for explaining classification decisions. This paper exploits the fact that the decisions from a non-linear SVM could be decoded into linguistic rules based on the information provided by support vectors and its decision function. Given a support vector of a certain class, cross points between each line, which is extended from the support vector along each axis, and SVM decision hyper-curve are searched first. A hyper-rectangular rule is derived from these cross points. The hyper-rectangle is tuned by a tuning phase in order to exclude those out-class data points. Finally, redundant rules are merged to produce a compact rule set. Simultaneously, important attributes could be highlighted in the extracted rules. Rule extraction results from our proposed method could follow decisions of SVM classifiers very well. Comparisons between our method and other rule extraction methods are also carried out on several benchmark data sets. Higher rule accuracy is obtained in our method with fewer number of premises in each rule.