Combined method of genetic programming and association rule algorithm

Genetic programming (GP) usually has a wide search space and a high flexibility. Therefore, GP may search for global optimum solution. But, in general, GPs learning speed is not so fast. An apriori algorithm is one of association rule algorithms. It can be applied to a large database. But it is difficult to define its parameters without experience. We propose a rule generation technique from a database using GP combined with an association rule algorithm. It takes rules generated by the association rule algorithm as initial individual of GP. The learning speed of GP is improved by the combined algorithm. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we apply it to the decision tree construction problem from the University of California at Irvine (UCI) machine-learning repository, and rule discovery problem from the occurrence of the hypertension database. We compare the results of the proposed method with prior ones.