M. Craven & J. Shavlik (1994).
Using Sampling and Queries to Extract Rules from Trained Neural Networks. Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 37-45, New Brunswick, NJ.

This publication is available in PDF and available in postscript.

Abstract:

Concepts learned by neural networks are difficult to understand because they are represented using large assemblages of real-valued parameters. One approach to understanding trained neural networks is to extract symbolic rules that describe their classification behavior. There are several existing rule-extraction approaches that operate by searching for such rules. We present a novel method that casts rule extraction not as a search problem, but instead as a learning problem. In addition to learning from training examples, our method exploits the property that networks can be efficiently queried. We describe algorithms for extracting both conjunctive and M-of-N rules, and present experiments that show that our method is more efficient than conventional search-based approaches.

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