ur-CAIM: improved CAIM discretization for unbalanced and balanced data

Supervised discretization is one of basic data preprocessing techniques used in data mining. CAIM (class-attribute interdependence maximization) is a discretization algorithm of data for which the classes are known. However, new arising challenges such as the presence of unbalanced data sets, call for new algorithms capable of handling them, in addition to balanced data. This paper presents a new discretization algorithm named ur-CAIM, which improves on the CAIM algorithm in three important ways. First, it generates more flexible discretization schemes while producing a small number of intervals. Second, the quality of the intervals is improved based on the data classes distribution, which leads to better classification performance on balanced and, especially, unbalanced data. Third, the runtime of the algorithm is lower than CAIM's. The algorithm has been designed free-parameter and it self-adapts to the problem complexity and the data class distribution. The ur-CAIM was compared with 9 well-known discretization methods on 28 balanced, and 70 unbalanced data sets. The results obtained were contrasted through non-parametric statistical tests, which show that our proposal outperforms CAIM and many of the other methods on both types of data but especially on unbalanced data, which is its significant advantage.