A survey of emerging patterns for supervised classification

Obtaining accurate class prediction of a query object is an important component of supervised classification. However, it could be also important to understand the classification in terms of the application domain, mostly if the prediction disagrees with the expected results. Many accurate classifiers are unable to explain their classification results in terms understandable by an application expert. Classifiers based on emerging patterns, on the other hand, are accurate and easy to understand. The goal of this article is to review the state-of-the-art methods for mining emerging patterns, classify them by different taxonomies, and identify new trends. In this survey, we present the most important emerging pattern miners, categorizing them on the basis of the mining paradigm, the use of discretization, and the stage where the mining occurs. We provide detailed descriptions of the mining paradigms with their pros and cons, what helps researchers and users to select the appropriate algorithm for a given application.