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Function decomposition was originally developed in 50's and
60's - thanks to RL Ashenhurst and HA Curtis - to be used in the
design of switching circuits, but it failed to raise much interest
in mid decades of the last century.
Recently, the interest for the method reappeared, not only in the switching
circuits design (due to FPGA devices) but also in the area of
artificial intelligence. Why? The basic idea of function
decomposition proved to be useful in solving some hard problems of
Artificial Intelligence, and providing grounds for new machine
learning, constructive induction and data mining
algorithms.
As first, function
decomposition can be seen as a new machine learning paradigm. The
distinguishing capabilities of function decomposition are to
discover new concepts from training data, organize them into a
concept hierarchy, and induce concept descriptions by decomposing
the original training set into smaller and less complex example
sets.
Our experimental
work shows that this approach may not only generalize well, but
perhaps more importantly, may discover useful and interpretable
concepts. We strongly believe, however, that decomposition should
not be used alone and in the completely automatic fashion, but
should rather be incorporated within interactive data mining systems
to propose new concepts that are then reviewed and interpreted by
experts.
In the past years
we have been developing a particular implementation of function
decomposition called HINT (Hierarchy Induction Tool). In addition to
basic decomposition techniques as proposed in 1950's by Ashenhurst
and Curtis HINT includes:
Handling of
multi-valued attributes, discovery of multi-valued concepts;
Noise handling;
A technique to
directly handle continuous attributes (without
pre-discretization);
Mechanisms to
use devised concepts in constructive-induction
scheme.
HINT has been
recently included and integrated within
Orange, a data mining
and machine learning framework. This is particularly important from
the point of view of experimentation and interface, since Orange
allows scripting and can use subcomponents of HINT, thus permitting
a co-reuse and construction and testing of methods that include a
combination of methods (like HINT for constructive induction and
Naive Bayes for classifier construction).