Computing Optimal Decision Sets with SAT

Abstract

As machine learning is increasingly used to help make decisions, there is a demand for these decisions to be explainable. Arguably, the most explainable machine learning models use decision rules. This paper focuses on decision sets, a type of model with unordered rules, which explains each prediction with a single rule. In order to be easy for humans to understand, these rules must be concise. Earlier work on generating optimal decision sets first minimizes the number of rules, and then minimizes the number of literals, but the resulting rules can often be very large. Here we consider a better measure, namely the total size of the decision set in terms of literals. So we are not driven to a..