Data mining is the efficient discovery of patterns in large databases, and classification rules are perhaps the most important type of patterns in data mining applications. However, the number of such classification rules is generally very big that selection of interesting ones among all discovered rules becomes an important task. In this paper, factors related to the interestingness of a rule are investigated and some new factors are proposed. Following this, an interactive rule interestingness-learning algorithm (IRIL) is developed to automatically label the classification rules either as "interesting" or "uninteresting" with limited user participation. In our study, VFP (Voting Feature Projections), a feature projection based incremental classification learning algorithm, is also developed in the framework of IRIL. The concept description learned by the VFP algorithm constitutes a novel hybrid approach for interestingness analysis of classification rules. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.