Information Entropy Minmization Discretization

[MarcoGV]

Greetings!  Could someone please explain in more detail that in the manual what information entropy minimization discretization does? I tried it with a file with 10000 cases generated from the anginaContinuous network in Section 3.3.8 of Jensen and Nielsen's book, discretizing the Therm variable with the Angina variable as target.  It gave reasonable results, with three intervals.  Maybe someone could look at that example and use it to explain which entropy is minimized.

[Anders L Madsen]

Hi Marco,

The IEM discretization method is based on the algorithm of the following paper:

U. M. Fayyad and K. B. Irani. 'Multi-Interval discretization of continuous valued attributes'. In Proceedings of the Thireenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 1022-1027, 1993.

If you have ideas for other (or better) discretization algorithms to implement, then please let us know.

Best regards
Anders