GESTS International Transactions on Computer Science and Engineering, Vol.32 (1), 2006, pp.

47-58

Discretization Techniques: A recent survey

Sotiris Kotsiantis, Dimitris Kanellopoulos

Educational Software Development Laboratory

Department of Mathematics, University of Patras, Greece
[email protected], [email protected]

Abstract. A discretization algorithm is needed in order to handle problems

with real-valued attributes with Decision Trees (DTs), Bayesian Networks
(BNs) and Rule-Learners (RLs), treating the resulting intervals as nominal val-
ues. The performance of these systems is tied to the right election of these in-
tervals. A good discretization algorithm has to balance the loss of information
intrinsic to this kind of process and generating a reasonable number of cut
points, that is, a reasonable search space. This paper presents the well known
discretization techniques. Of course, a single article cannot be a complete re-
view of all discretization algorithms. Despite this, we hope that the references
cited cover the major theoretical issues and guide the researcher to interesting
research directions and suggest possible combinations that have to be explored.

1 Introduction

Many Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are known to produce better models by
discretizing continuous attributes [14]. Naive Bayes (NB) classifier requires the esti-
mation of probabilities and the continuous explanatory attributes are not so easy to
handle, as they often take too many different values for a direct estimation of fre-
quencies. To circumvent this, a normal distribution of the continuous values can be
assumed, but this hypothesis is not always realistic. The same phenomenon leads
rules extraction techniques to build poorer sets of rules. DT algorithms carry out a
selection process of nominal attributes and cannot handle continuous ones directly.
As result, a large number of ML and statistical techniques can only be applied to data
sets composed entirely of nominal variables. However, a very large proportion of real
data sets include continuous variables: that is variables measured at the interval or
ratio level. One solution to this problem is to partition numeric variables into a num-
ber of sub-ranges and treat each such sub-range as a category. This process of parti-
tioning continuous variables into categories is usually termed discretization. Unfortu-
nately, the number of ways to discretize a continuous attribute is infinite. Discretiza-
tion is a potential time-consuming bottleneck, since the number of possible discretiza-
tions is exponential in the number of interval threshold candidates within the domain
[14].
The goal of discretization is to find a set of cut points to partition the range into a
small number of intervals that have good class coherence, which is usually measured
by an evaluation function. In addition to the maximization of interdependence be-
tween class labels and attribute values, an ideal discretization method should have a
secondary goal to minimize the number of intervals without significant loss of class-
attribute mutual dependence. Discretization is usually performed prior to the learning
process and it can be broken into two tasks. The first task is to find the number of
discrete intervals. Only a few discretization algorithms perform this; often, the user
must specify the number of intervals or provide a heuristic rule. The second task is to
find the width, or the boundaries, of the intervals given the range of values of a con-
tinuous attribute.
Usually, in discretization process, after sorting data in ascending or descending order
with respect to the variable to be discretized, landmarks must be chosen among the
whole dataset. In general, the algorithm for choosing landmarks can be either top-
down, which starts with an empty list of landmarks and splits intervals, or bottom-up,
which starts with the complete list of all the values as landmarks and merges intervals.
In both cases there is a stopping criterion, which specifies when to stop the discretiza-
tion process. Researchers in the ML community have introduced many discretization
algorithms. Most of these algorithms perform an iterative greedy heuristic search in
the space of candidate discretizations, using different types of scoring functions for
evaluating a discretization. A recent overview of various types of discretization algo-
rithms can be found in [28]. Thus, in this work apart from the brief description of the
discretization process we refer to some more recent works than those in Liu’s article
as well as few articles that were not referred by Liu.
The next section covers wide ranged issues of discretization process. The categories
of discretization methods are analysed in section 3, whereas the combination of dis-
cretization methods with DTs, RLs and BNs are presented in section 4. Finally, the
last section concludes this work.

2 Discretization process

The term “cut-point” refers to a real value within the range of continuous values that
divides the range into two intervals, one interval is less than or equal to the cutpoint
and the other interval is greater than the cut-point. For example, a continuous interval
[a, b] is partitioned into [a, c] and (c, b], where the value c is a cut-point. Cut-point is
also known as split-point. The term “arity” in the discretization context means the
number of intervals or partitions. Before discretization of a continuous feature, arity
can be set to k—the number of partitions in the continuous features. The maximum
number of cut-points is k − 1. Discretization process reduces the arity but there is a
trade-off between arity and its effect on the accuracy.
A typical discretization process broadly consists of four steps: (1) sorting the con-
tinuous values of the feature to be discretized, (2) evaluating a cut-point for splitting
or adjacent intervals for merging, (3) according to some criterion, splitting or merging
intervals of continuous value, and (4) finally stopping at some point.
After sorting, the next step in the discretization process is to find the best “cut-point”
to split a range of continuous values or the best pair of adjacent intervals to merge.
One typical evaluation function is to determine the correlation of a split or a merge
with the class label. There are numerous evaluation functions found in the literature
such as entropy measures and statistical measures (more details in the following sec-
tions). A stopping criterion specifies when to stop the discretization process. It is
usually governed by a trade-off between lower arity with a better understanding but
less accuracy and a higher arity with a poorer understanding but higher accuracy. The
number of inconsistencies (inconsistency is defined later) caused by discretization—it
should not be much higher than the number of inconsistencies of the original data
before discretization. Two instances are considered inconsistent if they are the same
in their attribute values except for their class labels.
Generally, the discretization methods can be categorised as: (1) supervised or unsu-
pervised, (2) direct or incremental, (3) global or local, (4) static or dynamic, (5) top-
down or bottom-up. We distinct these categories in the following section.

3 Categories of discretization methods

A distinction can be made dependent on whether the method takes class information
into account to find proper intervals or not. Several discretization methods, such as
equal width interval binning or equal frequency binning, do not make use of class
membership information during the discretization process. These methods are re-
ferred to as unsupervised methods. In contrast, discretization methods that use class
labels for carrying out discretization are referred to as supervised methods. Previous
research indicated that supervised are better than unsupervised methods [12].
The two representative algorithms of unsupervised (or class-blind) algorithms are
equal-width and equal-frequency discretizations. The equal-width discretization algo-
rithm determines the minimum and maximum values of the discretized attribute and
then divides the range into the user-defined number of equal width discrete intervals.
The equal-frequency algorithm determines the minimum and maximum values of the
discretized attribute, sorts all values in ascending order, and divides the range into a
user-defined number of intervals so that every interval contains the same number of
sorted values. The obvious weakness of this equal-width method is that in cases
where the outcome observations are not distributed evenly, a large amount of impor-
tant information can be lost after the discretization process. For equal-frequency,
many occurrences of a continuous value could cause the occurrences to be assigned
into different bins. One improvement can be after continuous values are assigned into
bins, boundaries of every pair of neighboring bins are adjusted so that duplicate val-
ues should belong to one bin only.
Another dimension of discretization methods is direct vs. incremental process [14].
Direct methods divide the range of k intervals simultaneously (i.e., equal-width),
needing an additional input from the user to determine the number of intervals. In-
cremental methods begin with a simple discretization and pass through an improve-
ment process, needing an additional criterion to know when to stop discretizing [7].
The distinction between global and local discretization methods is dependent on when
discretization is performed [28]. Global discretization handles discretization of each
numeric attribute as a pre-processing step, i.e. before induction of a classifier whereas
local methods, like C4.5 carry out discretization on-the-fly (during induction). Em-
pirical results have indicated that global discretization methods often produced supe-
rior results compared to local methods since the former use the entire value domain of
a numeric attribute for discretization, whereas local methods produce intervals that
are applied to subpartitions of the instance space.
The distinction between static and dynamic methods depends on whether the method
takes feature interactions into account [32]. Static methods, such as binning, entropy-
based partitioning and the 1R algorithm [21], determine the number of partitions for
each attribute independent of the other features. In contrast, dynamic methods con-
duct a search through the space of possible k partitions for all features simultaneously,
thereby capturing interdependencies in feature discretization.
Finally, the distinction between top-down and bottom-up discretization methods can
be made. Top-down methods consider one big interval containing all known values of
a feature and then partition this interval into smaller and smaller subintervals until a
certain stopping criterion, for example Minimum Description Length (MDL), or op-
timal number of intervals is achieved. In contrast, bottom-up methods initially con-
sider a number of intervals, determined by the set of boundary points, to combine
these intervals during execution until a certain stopping criterion, such as a x2 thresh-
old, or optimal number of intervals is achieved [24].
In the discretization problem, a compromise must be found between information
quality (homogeneous intervals in regard to the attribute to predict) and statistical
quality (sufficient sample size in every interval to ensure generalization). The chi-
square-based criteria focus on the statistical point of view whereas the entropy-based
criteria focus on the information point of view. Other criteria (such as Gini or Fusin-
ter criterion) try to find a trade off between information and statistical properties.
There are still other approaches, similar to the wrapper approach involved in the fea-
ture selection field as well as evolutionary based approaches. We analyze all these
approaches in the following sub-sections.

3.1 Chi-square based methods

Chi-square (x2) is a statistical measure that conducts a significance test on the rela-
tionship between the values of a feature and the class. Kerber [24] argues that in an
accurate discretization, the relative class frequencies should be fairly consistent
within an interval (otherwise the interval should be split to express this difference)
but two adjacent intervals should not have similar relative class frequency (in that
case the adjacent intervals should be merged into one). The x2 statistic determines the
similarity of adjacent intervals based on some significance level. It tests the hypothe-
sis that two adjacent intervals of a feature are independent of the class. If they are
independent, they should be merged; otherwise they should remain separate.
The top-down method based on chi-square is ChiSplit. It searches for the best split of
an interval, by maximizing the chi-square criterion applied to the two sub-intervals
adjacent to the splitting point: the interval is split if both sub-intervals substantially
differ statistically. The ChiSplit stopping rule is based on a user-defined chi-square
threshold to reject the split if the two sub-intervals are too similar.
The bottom-up method based on chi-square is ChiMerge [24]. It searches for the best
merge of adjacent intervals by minimizing the chi-square criterion applied locally to
two adjacent intervals: they are merged if they are statistically similar. The stopping
rule is based on a user-defined Chi-square threshold to reject the merge if the two
adjacent intervals are insufficiently similar. No definite rule is given to choose this
threshold. Chi2 [30] is an automated version of ChiMerge. In Chi2, the statistical
significance level keeps changing to merge more and more adjacent intervals as long
as the inconsistency criterion [29] is satisfied. A method very similar to Chi2 is
ConMerge [33] which also uses the x2 statistic and the inconsistency measure. Instead
of considering one attribute at a time, ConMerge chooses the lowest x2 value among
the intervals of all continuous features.
Boulle [5] proposes the discretization method Khiops, based on the chi-square statis-
tic. In contrast with related methods ChiMerge and ChiSplit, this method optimizes
the Chi-square criterion in a global manner on the whole discretization domain and
does not require any stopping criterion. The Khiops method starts the discretization
from the elementary single value intervals. It evaluates all merges between adjacent
intervals and selects the best one according to the chi-square criterion applied to the
whole set of intervals. The stopping rule is based on the confidence level computed
with the chi-square statistic. The method automatically stops merging intervals as
soon as the confidence level, related to the Chi-square test of independence between
the discretized attribute and the class attribute, does not decrease anymore.

3.2 Entropy based methods

Other discretization methods use entropy measures to evaluate candidate cutpoints.

This means that an entropy-based method will use the class information entropy of
candidate partitions to select boundaries for discretization. Class information entropy
is a measure of purity and it measures the amount of information which would be
needed to specify to which class an instance belongs. It considers one big interval
containing all known values of a feature and then recursively partitions this interval
into smaller subintervals until some stopping criterion, for example Minimum De-
scription Length (MDL) Principle or an optimal number of intervals is achieved.
Other evaluation measures include Gini, dissimilarity and the Hellinger measure.
The MDL principle states that the best hypothesis is the one with minimal description
length. As partitioning always decreases the value of the entropy function, consider-
ing the description lengths of the hypotheses allows balancing the entropy gain and
eventually accepting the null hypothesis. Performing recursive bipartitions with this
criterion leads to a discretization of the continuous explanatory attribute at hand.
FID [15] evaluates as a candidate cut point the midpoint between each successive pair
of the sorted values. For each evaluation of a candidate cut point, the data are discre-
tized into two intervals and the resulting class information entropy is calculated. A
binary discretization is determined by selecting the cut point for which the entropy is
minimal amongst all candidate cut points. This binary discretization is applied recur-
sively, always selecting the best cut point. A minimum description length criterion
(MDL) is applied to decide when to stop discretization.
It has been shown that optimal cut points for entropy minimization must lie between
examples of different classes [15]. A similar result can be proved for Zeta maximiza-
tion: a measure based on minimization of the error rate when each value of an inde-
pendent variable must predict a different value of a dependent variable [20].
The approach of [9] seeks to maximize the mutual dependence as measured by the
interdependence redundancy between the discrete intervals and the class labels, and
can automatically determine the most preferred number of intervals for an inductive
learning application. Because of its ability to automatically select the minimum num-
ber of intervals without significantly reducing useful mutual information, the method
can speed up the learning time of most inductive learners with little classification
accuracy loss.
USD [19] divides the continuous attributes in a finite number of intervals with maxi-
mum goodness, so that the average-goodness of the final set of intervals will be the
highest. The main process is divided in two different parts: first, it calculates the
initial intervals by means of projections, depending on the goodnesses obtained after
carrying out two possible actions: to join or not adjacent intervals. The main features
of the algorithm are: it is deterministic, does not need any user–parameter and its
complexity is subquadratic.
The goal of the CAIM algorithm [26] is to maximize the class-attribute interdepend-
ence and to generate a (possibly) minimal number of discrete intervals. The CAIM
algorithm maximizes mutual class-attribute interdependence and possibly generates
the smallest number of intervals for a given continuous attribute. It was tested on
several well-known data sets and compared with six other state-of-the-art discretiza-
tion algorithms. According to the authors, the comparison shows that the CAIM algo-
rithm generates discretization schemes with, on average, the lowest number of inter-
vals and the highest dependence between class labels and discrete intervals, thus
outperforming other discretization algorithms.

3.3 Wrapper based methods

While most discretization methods are employed as a preprocessing step to an induc-

tion algorithm, there are still other approaches, similar to the wrapper approach in-
volved in the feature selection field. For example, the authors of [4] and [6] propose
approaches that allow to refine the discretization of the continuous explanatory attrib-
utes by taking feedback from an induction algorithm. Error-based methods, such as
[31], evaluate candidate cutpoints against an error function and explore a search
space of boundary points to minimize the sum of false positive (FP) and false nega-
tive (FN) errors on the training set. In other words, given a fixed number of intervals,
error-based discretization aims at finding the best discretization that minimizes the
total number of errors (FP and FN) made by grouping together particular continuous
values into an interval.
Another example of using accuracy for discretization is Adaptive Quantizer [8]. It
considers how well one attribute predicts the class at a time. For each attribute, its
continuous range is split into two partitions either by equal-frequency or by equal-
width. The splitting is tested by running a classifier to see if the splitting helps im-
prove accuracy. It continues binarizing subranges and the cut-point which gives the
minimum rate is selected. As it involves training a classifier, it is usually more time
consuming than those without using a classifier.
Elomaa and Rousu [13] showed that in order to find Training Set Error (the optimal
discretization in which the interval labeling differs least often from that of the data
points) one only needs to examine a small number of all cut points, called alternation
points. On the other hand, the authors prove that failing to check an alternation point
may lead to a suboptimal discretization. Alternation points can be identified effi-
ciently once the data has been ordered.
Elomaa and Rousu [14] presented techniques for speeding up the discovery of opti-
mal—with respect to an evaluation function—multisplits along numerical value
ranges. The techniques are based on proving some cut points or prefixes of partitions
as suboptimal and thus discarding them from the search space of the algorithms.
Overall, the quadratic-time dynamic programming algorithm runs twice as fast on the
average and in some cases up to 90 percent faster than the baseline algorithm.
The objective of cost-based discretization approach [23] is to take into account the
cost of making errors instead of just minimizing the total sum of errors, such as in
error-based discretization. The specification of this cost function is dependent on the
costs assigned to the different error types. In the special case where the cost of mak-
ing errors is equal, the introduced method of cost-based discretization is in fact equal
to error-based discretization.

3.4 Adaptive Discretization and Evolutionary based methods

Another discretization-based knowledge representation has been developed, called

Adaptive Discretization Intervals (ADI) [3]. This representation is used inside a Pitts-
burgh LCS and uses rules that contain intervals built joining together the low level
intervals provided by the discretization algorithm, thus collapsing the search space
when it is possible. Also, this representation can use several discretization algorithms
at the same time allowing the system to choose the correct discretization for each
problem and attribute. The authors of [2] generalize the ADI representation approach
(proposing ADI2) by also using heuristic non-uniform discretization methods. This
representation evolves rules that can use multiple discretizations, letting the evolution
choose the correct discretization for each rule and attribute. Moreover, the intervals
defined in each discretization can split or merge among them through the evolution
process, reducing the search space where it is possible. There are other systems that,
like ADI, perform evolutionary induction of rules based on discretization [17], [10].
A comparison of ADI with these two methods is found in [1].
An elegant and robust approach for overcoming univariate supervised discretization
methods’ drawback is provided by evolutionary algorithms, which can be used for
performing local multivariate discretization during the evolutionary learning process.
In these methods numerical values are handled by means of inequalities that can be
modified, by means of ad hoc operators, during the evolutionary process. These
methods differ among each other mainly in the way inequalities, describing continu-
ous attribute subranges, are encoded, and in the definition of suitable genetic opera-
tors for modifying inequalities. The authors of [11] analyze experimentally discretiza-
tion algorithms for handling continuous attributes in evolutionary learning. They
consider a learning system that induces a set of rules in a fragment of first-order logic,
and introduce a method where a given discretization algorithm is used to generate
initial inequalities, which describe sub-ranges of attributes’ values. Mutation opera-
tors exploiting information on the class label of the examples are used during the
learning process for refining inequalities.

3.5 Other methods

In theory, given a k-valued classification variable C, a continuous variable X could be

partitioned into k sub-ranges by calculating e.g. Zeta [20] for each of the possible
assignments of the k-1 cut points and selecting that combination of cut points that
gives the largest value of Zeta. In general such a method will not be practicable be-
cause the number of combinations of cut points is extremely large. Cerquides and
Lopez [7] proposed a discretization method based on a distance metric between parti-
tions that can be easily implemented in parallel. This method is very effective and
efficient in very large datasets.
For discretization, two methods of cluster analysis: agglomerative (bottom-up) and
divisive (top-down) have been also used [19]. In agglomerative techniques, initially
each case is a single cluster, and then they are fused together, forming larger and
larger clusters. In divisive techniques, initially all cases are grouped in one cluster,
then this cluster is gradually divided into smaller and smaller clusters. In both meth-
ods, during the first step of discretization, cluster formation, cases that exhibit the
most similarity are fused into clusters. Once this process is completed, clusters are
projected on all attributes to determine initial intervals on the domains of the numeri-
cal attributes. During the merging step adjacent intervals are merged together.
The univariate case does not take into account any correlation between the explana-
tory attributes and fails to discover conjointly defined patterns. Many authors pro-
posed multivariate methods that search for cut points simultaneously [27]. Ferrandiz
and Boull [16] proposed an extension to the multivariate case, relying on the multi-
variate definition of discrete neighborhood by means of a non-oriented graph struc-
ture. A framework for supervised bipartitioning has been proposed, which applied
recursively leads to a new multivariate discretization algorithm.
Non-Disjoint Discretization (NDD) forms overlapping intervals for a numeric attrib-
ute [35], always locating a value toward the middle of an interval to obtain more
reliable probability estimation. It also adjusts the number and size of discretized in-
tervals to the number of training instances, seeking an appropriate trade-off between
bias and variance of probability estimation.

4 Combining discretization methods with DTs, RLs and BNs

The quadratic time complexity of the popular C4.5 DT learning algorithm for non-
numeric data increases by a logarithmic factor when numerical attributes are proc-
essed. Many practical DTs—including C4.5—use in partitioning techniques that only
look for the best halving of the domain. Recently, however, considering multisplits of
the domain with more than two intervals has gained popularity. In general, obtained
results (DTs, RLs) using discrete features are usually more compact, shorter and more
accurate than using continuous ones, hence the results can be more closely examined,
compared, used and reused. Supervised discretization techniques might reasonably be
expected to lead to more accurate classification trees since the partitions they produce
are directly related to the class to be predicted. On the other hand one might expect
most of the unsupervised techniques to be considerably faster since they involve little
more than sorting the data, an operation which is common to all discretization meth-
ods.
Dougherty et al. [12] carried out a comparative study of five discretization procedures
using 16 data sets from the UC Irvine ML Database Repository. The methods com-
pared were two unsupervised global methods (equal width interval procedures), two
supervised global methods (1RD [21] and entropy minimisation [15]), and C4.5
which is a supervised local method. In all cases the tree was actually constructed by
C4.5 but in the four global methods the data was pre-processed using the correspond-
ing procedure to discretize all continuous variables. Somewhat surprisingly Dough-
erty et al [12] found only small differences, most of which were not statistically sig-
nificant, between the classification accuracies achieved by resulting DTs. None pro-
duced the highest accuracy for all data sets. In particular the local supervised method,
C4.5, showed no advantage over other supervised methods: Fayyad & Irani’s method
[15] achieved the best overall results.
Although there exist a number of efficient inference algorithms and implementations
for probabilistic reasoning in BNs with discrete variables, few algorithms support
efficient inference in hybrid BNs, BNs where continuous and discrete variables are
intermixed. Exact probabilistic inference in hybrid networks can be reduced to taking
multidimensional integrals in the same way that exact inference in discrete networks
can be reduced to computing sums. However, computing integrals exactly is possible
only for a restricted class of continuous functions. Kozlov and Koller [25] con-
structed an iterative anytime algorithm for BNs that gradually improves the quality of
the discretization and the accuracy of the answer on a query.
For NB, one common discretization approach is fixed k-interval discretization
(FKID). Another popular one is Fayyad and Irani’s entropy minimization heuristic
discretization (FID) [15]. Two recent alternatives are lazy discretization (LD) [22]
and proportional k-interval discretization (PKID) [34]. LD [22] delays probability
estimation until classification time. It waits until a test instance is presented to deter-
mine the cut points for each numeric attribute. For a numeric attribute value from the
test instance, it selects a pair of cut points such that the value is in the middle of its
corresponding interval whose size is the same as created by FKID with k = 10. LD
tends to have high memory and computational requirements because of its lazy meth-
odology. PKID [34] adjusts discretization bias and variance by tuning the interval
size and number, and further adjusts the probability estimation bias and variance of
NB classifiers to achieve lower classification error. The larger the interval (ai, bi], the
more instances in it, the lower the discretization variance, hence the lower the vari-
ance of NB’ probability estimation. However, the larger the interval, the less distin-
guishing information is obtained about the particular value xi of attribute Xi, the
higher the discretization bias, hence the higher the bias of the probability estimation.
So, increasing interval size (decreasing interval number) will decrease variance but
increase bias. Conversely, decreasing interval size (increasing interval number) will
decrease bias but increase variance. PKID aims to resolve this conflict by adjusting
the interval size and number proportional to the number of training instances.

5 Conclusion

A number of ML algorithms can be applied only to data described by discrete nu-

merical or nominal attributes (features). In the case of continuous attributes, there is a
need for a discretization algorithm that transforms continuous attributes into discrete
ones. Continuous-valued attributes are transformed into nominal ones by splitting the
range of the attribute values in a finite number of intervals.
Since a large number of possible attribute values slows and makes inductive learning
ineffective, one of the main goals of a discretization algorithm is to significantly re-
duce the number of discrete intervals of a continuous attribute. At the same time, the
algorithm should maximize the interdependency between discrete attribute values and
class labels, as this minimizes the information loss due to discretization. A satisfac-
tory trade off between these two goals needs to be achieved. Many studies show in-
duction tasks can benefit from discretization: rules with discrete values are normally
shorter and more understandable and discretization can lead to improved predictive
accuracy. In other words, the improvement can be measured in three aspects through
before/after discretization comparison: (1) accuracy, (2) time for discretization and
for learning, and (3) understandability of the learning result. There are numerous
discretization methods available in the literature. Most of discretization algorithms
perform an iterative greedy heuristic search in the space of candidate discretizations,
using different types of scoring functions for evaluating a discretization. In this article,
we presented a survey of discretization methods and discussed various dimensions in
which these methods can be categorized. The key question is not whether a discreti-
zation method is superior to others, but under which conditions a particular method
can significantly outperform others on a given problem.

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Biography

S. Kotsiantis received a diploma in D. Kanellopoulos received a diploma

mathematics, a Master and a Ph.D. de- in electrical engineering and a Ph.D.
gree in computer science from the Uni- degree in electrical and computer
versity of Patras, Greece. His research engineering from the University of
interests are in the field of data mining Patras, Greece. He has more than 40
and machine learning. He has more than publications to his credit in interna-
50 publications to his credit in interna- tional journals and conferences.
tional journals and conferences.