Authors
T.E. Röber
Adia Lumadjeng
Hakan Akyuz
S.I. Birbil
Date (dd-mm-yyyy)
2025-11
Title
Rule Generation for Classification: Scalability, Interpretability, and Fairness
Journal
Computers & Operations Research
Volume
183
Publication Year
2025-11
Document type
Article
Abstract
We introduce a new rule-based optimization method for classification with constraints. The proposed method leverages column generation for linear programming, and hence, is scalable to large datasets. The resulting pricing subproblem is shown to be NP-Hard. We recourse to a decision tree-based heuristic and solve a proxy pricing subproblem for acceleration. The method returns a set of rules along with their optimal weights indicating the importance of each rule for learning. We address interpretability and fairness by assigning cost coefficients to the rules and introducing additional constraints. In particular, we focus on local interpretability and generalize a separation criterion in fairness to multiple sensitive attributes and classes. We test the performance of the proposed methodology on a collection of datasets and present a case study to elaborate on its different aspects. The proposed rule-based learning method exhibits a good compromise between local interpretability and fairness on the one side, and accuracy on the other side.
URL
go to publisher's site
Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/11245.1/4e1665de-cb8f-4b99-8e5c-946e2bd5246d