X-Class: Associative classification of XML documents by structure

The supervised classification of XML documents by structure involves learning predictive models in which certain structural regularities discriminate the individual document classes. Hitherto, research has focused on the adoption of prespecified substructures. This is detrimental for classification effectiveness, since the a priori chosen substructures may not accord with the structural properties of the XML documents. Therein, an unexplored question is how to choose the type of structural regularity that best adapts to the structures of the available XML documents. We tackle this problem through X-Class, an approach that handles all types of tree-like substructures and allows for choosing the most discriminatory one. Algorithms are designed to learn compact rule-based classifiers in which the chosen substructures discriminate the classes of XML documents. X-Class is studied across various domains and types of substructures. Its classification performance is compared against several rule-based and SVM-based competitors. Empirical evidence reveals that the classifiers induced by X-Class are compact, scalable, and at least as effective as the established competitors. In particular, certain substructures allow the induction of very compact classifiers that generally outperform the rule-based competitors in terms of effectiveness over all chosen corpora of XML data. Furthermore, such classifiers are substantially as effective as the SVM-based competitor, with the additional advantage of a high-degree of interpretability. © 2013 ACM 1046-8188/2013/01-ART2 s15.00.