A discretization method based on maximizing the area under receiver operating characteristic curve

Abstract

Many machine learning algorithms require the features to be categorical. Hence, they require all numeric-valued data to be discretized into intervals. In this paper, we present a new discretization method based on the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) Curve (AUC) measure. Maximum area under ROC curve-based discretization (MAD) is a global, static and supervised discretization method. MAD uses the sorted order of the continuous values of a feature and discretizes the feature in such a way that the AUC based on that feature is to be maximized. The proposed method is compared with alternative discretization methods such as ChiMerge, Entropy-Minimum Description Length Principle (MDLP), Fixed Frequency Discretization (FFD), and Proportional Discretization (PD). FFD and PD have been recently proposed and are designed for Naïve Bayes learning. ChiMerge is a merging discretization method as the MAD method. Evaluations are performed in terms of M-Measure, an AUC-based metric for multi-class classification, and accuracy values obtained from Naïve Bayes and Aggregating One-Dependence Estimators (AODE) algorithms by using real-world datasets. Empirical results show that MAD is a strong candidate to be a good alternative to other discretization methods. © 2013 World Scientific Publishing Company.