Decision Support Through Subgroup Discovery: Three Case Studies and the Lessons Learned

This paper presents ways to use subgroup discovery to generate actionable knowledge for decision support. Actionable knowledge is explicit symbolic knowledge, typically presented in the form of rules, that allows the decision maker to recognize some important relations and to perform an appropriate action, such as targeting a direct marketing campaign, or planning a population screening campaign aimed at detecting individuals with high disease risk. Different subgroup discovery approaches are outlined, and their advantages over using standard classification rule learning are discussed. Three case studies, a medical and two marketing ones, are used to present the lessons learned in solving problems requiring actionable knowledge generation for decision support.