  Classification, which involves finding rules that partition a given data set
into disjoint groups, is one class of data mining problems. Approaches proposed
so far for mining classification rules for large databases are mainly decision
tree based symbolic learning methods. The connectionist approach based on
neural networks has been thought not well suited for data mining. One of the
major reasons cited is that knowledge generated by neural networks is not
explicitly represented in the form of rules suitable for verification or
interpretation by humans. This paper examines this issue. With our newly
developed algorithms, rules which are similar to, or more concise than those
generated by the symbolic methods can be extracted from the neural networks.
The data mining process using neural networks with the emphasis on rule
extraction is described. Experimental results and comparison with previously
published works are presented.
