Decision Support Systems 54 (2012) 142152

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Decision Support Systems

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/dss

Mining actionable behavioral rules

Peng Su a, Wenji Mao b,, Daniel Zeng b, c, Huimin Zhao d
a

School of Management Engineering, Shandong Jianzhu University, Shandong 250101, China

State Key Laboratory of Management and Control for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
c
Department of Management Information Systems, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
d
Sheldon B. Lubar School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, P. O. Box 742, Milwaukee, WI 53201, USA
b

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 23 October 2011
Received in revised form 2 March 2012
Accepted 29 April 2012
Available online 10 May 2012
Keywords:
Data mining
Actionable knowledge discovery
Actionable behavioral rule

a b s t r a c t
Many applications can benet from constructing models to predict the behavior of an entity. However, such
models do not provide the user with explicit knowledge that can be directly used to inuence (restrain or
encourage) behavior for the user's interest. Undoubtedly, the user often exactly needs such knowledge.
This type of knowledge is called actionable knowledge. Actionability is a very important criterion measuring
the interestingness of mined patterns. In this paper, to mine such knowledge, we take a rst step toward
formally dening a new class of data mining problem, named actionable behavioral rule mining. Our denition
explicitly states the problem as a search problem in a framework of support and expected utility. We also
propose two algorithms for mining such rules. Our experiment shows the validity of our approach, as well
as the practical value of our dened problem.
2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
The behavior of an entity, be it an individual, group, organization,
or country, is often greatly inuenced by various environmental (e.g.,
social, political, cultural, and economical) factors [24]. Knowledge of
such inuence discovered through data mining has been shown to
be extremely valuable for the user (e.g., a corporation or government)
in many application domains, from homeland security to public policy,
to business intelligence, to name a few.
Past related studies (e.g., [25,22,5,10,11]) have mainly focused on
model building and interpretation. In particular, most of these studies
aim at constructing predictive models, which provide predictions like
group g will have behavior b if condition c holds. While such predictions may be very valuable for the user in getting ready for the predicted
behavior of the entity in concern, they do not directly and explicitly
suggest specic actions to take to inuence (restrain or encourage)
the behavior for the user's interest. The user, however, often exactly
needs such knowledge.
Consider an example in security informatics. In a hypothetical
scenario, assume that recently, Hezbollah has launched frequent violent
terrorist attacks, and consequently, the Lebanese government is facing
mounting domestic and international pressures. The Lebanese government certainly wants to change this situation by taking some effective
actions to restrain terroristic behaviors of Hezbollah. As such, reliable
propositions or predictions in the form of rules, such as the following,
will be of signicant value and interest.
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: peng.su.casia@gmail.com (P. Su), wenji.mao@ia.ac.cn (W. Mao),
zeng@email.arizona.edu (D. Zeng), hzhao@uwm.edu (H. Zhao).
0167-9236/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.dss.2012.04.013

If the Lebanese government changes the degree of using lethal

violence against Hezbollah from level 1 (not using lethal violence)
to 2 (using periodic lethal violence) and the degree of being in
agreement with Hezbollah from level 1 (negotiation) to 3 (major
concession), the degree of terrorist attacks aiming at domestic
targets launched by Hezbollah will change from level 3 to 2 with
70% condence or 1 with 20% condence, or remain unchanged
with 10% condence, and the degree of terrorist attacks aiming
at international targets will change from level 3 to 2 with 30%
condence or 1 with 20% condence, or remain unchanged with
50% condence.
In another hypothetical scenario, assume that in recent months, a
corporation has been suffering severe employee loss, which is
adversely affecting the operations of the corporation. The management
of the corporation wants to change this situation by taking some effective
actions to restrain job-hopping behaviors of the staff and is interested in
action proposals, such as the following.
If the corporation raises the overall salary level from 2 to 3 and
the paid vacation level from 1 to 2, the level of the job-hopping
behavior of the staff will change from 3 to 1 with 60% condence or
2 with 30% condence or remain unchanged with 10% condence.
As these scenarios illustrate, mining actionable rules to inuence
entity behaviors has wide applicability in various domains. Rules
like the examples provide the user explicit suggestions of actions to
inuence the behaviors of the entity in concern for the user's benet.
This type of knowledge is called actionable knowledge, which is
knowledge that one can act upon, something that leads to an act,

P. Su et al. / Decision Support Systems 54 (2012) 142152

and something that makes things happen [9]. Actionability is an

important aspect of interestingness that has to be quantied based
on the subjective evaluation by the user to facilitate decision making
[23]. Making mined patterns actionable is one of the central themes in
data mining [9]. However, the problem of mining actionable rules for
inuencing entity behaviors has not been identied and studied in
the literature yet, although there have been several investigations
(e.g., [21,29,13]) into other types of actionable knowledge discovery.
In this paper, we take a rst step toward establishing a new class
of data mining problem, named actionable behavioral rule mining.
We propose a formal denition for this problem. Our denition
explicitly states the problem as a search problem in a framework of
support and expected utility, and guarantees the completeness and
correctness of the discovered actionable rules. We then develop algorithms for solving this new problem. We also conduct an experiment
to validate our proposed approach, and evaluate the practical value of
our dened problem and the comparative performance of the algorithms. The experimental results strongly suggest the validity of our
approach.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 proposes
the formal denition of the actionable behavioral rule mining
problem. Section 3 gives our proposed mining algorithms. Section 4
presents our experimental study demonstrating the validity and the utility of our proposed problem denition and mining algorithms. Section 5
reviews and discusses the related work. Finally, Section 6 summarizes
our contributions and discusses potential future research directions.
2. Problem denition
We specify the problem of actionable behavioral rule mining
through a series of formal denitions, starting with the denition of
a behavioral information system along the line of Pawlak's denition
of an information system [16].
Denition 1. A behavioral information system pertinent to a certain
entity is dened as a 5-tuple I = (O, o*, A, D, ), where O is a nite nonempty set of observations, o* O is the projected next observation, A
is a nite nonempty set of attributes, D = a ADa, where Da is the
value domain of attribute a, and : O A D is a function associating
each observation with a set of attribute values. A is further divided
into two subsets, that is, A = Aen Abe, where Abe is a set of behavior
attributes describing the behaviors of the entity and Aen is a set of
environment attributes characterizing the environment in which the
entity situates and having some causal inuence upon behavior
attributes.
Except for o*, each observation regarding the environment and
behavior attributes comes from a time period of a certain interval.
o* is a projection, based on recent observations, of the forthcoming
observation should the user takes no action to inuence the entity's
behaviors. For example, assuming that a terrorist group in some
country is frequently launching terrorist attacks recently, it is very
likely that in a period of time (e.g., a year), the serious situation
would remain unchanged or change very slightly if the government
does not take any targeted action. The objective of actionable behavioral rule mining is to identify proposals of benecial actions that may
be taken to improve upon the projected next observation o*. In the
just-mentioned example, the government may want to know what
actions can be taken to reduce the frequency of such attacks with
an overall satisfactory utility.
Without loss of generality, we assume that all attributes (both
environment and behavior) are categorical while numerical attributes,
if any, have been discretized in advance. Note that a behavior attribute
is not restricted to be binary indicating whether a certain behavior
occurs. It may also describe how frequent the behavior occurs, the
extent of the behavior, and so on. Abe should be a collectively comprehensive set classifying the behaviors of the entity from a certain angle.

143

Example. Consider a hypothetical behavioral information system for

Hezbollah organization I = (O, o*, A, D, ), where O = {o*, o1, o2, , o10},
Aen = {e1, e2}, Abe = {b1, b2}, De1 = De2 = {0, 1}, Db1 = Db2 = {0, 1, 2}, and
is presented in Table 1 (e.g., (o1, e1) = 1, (o3, b2) = 2). The values
and the corresponding meanings of the attributes can be found in
Appendix A. We will continue to use this example in the rest of the
paper to illustrate various points.
Denition 2. Let I = (O, o*, A, D, ) be a behavioral information system.
An action is dened as a triple t = (a, vf, vt), where a Aen, vf = (o*,a),
and vt Da. We call t a standard action, if vf vt. We call t a non-standard
action, if vf = vt. We say that action t = (a, vf, vt) holds, if the value of a is
changed from vf to vt. An action set S, also called a |S|-action set, is
dened as a nite nonempty set of actions such that t1. a t2. a for any
t1, t2 S. We say that action set S holds, if every t S holds. We say
that observation o supports S, if (o, t. a) = t. vt for every t S. The support
of S is dened as
supS jfo Ojo supports Sgj:
We call S a frequent action set, or frequent |S|-action set, with regard
to a user-specied threshold referred to as minsup, if sup(S) minsup.
Example. (e1, 1, 0) is a standard action. (e1, 1, 1) is a non-standard
action. (e1, 0, 1) is not an action. {(e1, 1, 0)} is a 1-action set and
{(e1, 1, 0), (e2, 1, 0)} is a 2-action set. Neither {(e1, 0, 1)} nor
{(e1, 1, 0), (e1, 0, 1)} is an action set. We say that (e1, 1, 0) holds, if
the value of ORSTPOLSUP is changed from 1 to 0. We say that action
set {(e1, 1, 0), (e2, 1, 1)} holds, if both (e1, 1, 0) and (e2, 1, 1) hold.
sup({(e1, 1, 0)}) = |{o5, o6, o7, o8, o9, o10}| = 6. sup({(e1, 1, 0), (e2, 1, 1)})
=|{o5, o6, o7}| = 3. Given minsup= 2, {(e1, 1,0)} is a frequent 1-action
set and {(e1, 1, 0), (e2, 1, 1)} is a frequent 2-action set. Given minsup= 4,
{(e1, 1, 0)} is a frequent 1-action set but {(e1, 1,0), (e2, 1,1)} is not a
frequent 2-action set.
Denition 3. Let I = (O, o*, A, D, ) be a behavioral information system.
An effect is dened as a triple e = (a, vf, vt), where a Abe, vf = (o*, a)
and vt Da. Note that vf can be equal to vt. We say that effect e = (a, vf,
vt) takes place, if the value of a changes from vf to vt. We say that observation o supports (S, e) where S is an action set and e is an effect, if o
supports S and (o, e. a) = e. vt. An effectprobability is dened as a pair
ep = (e, p), where e is an effect and p [0, 1]. We say that an effect
probability ep= (e, p) takes place, if e takes place with probability p.
Example. (b1, 2, 0) is an effect. (b1, 0, 2) is not an effect. We say that
effect (b1, 2, 0) takes place, if the value of DEMORGVIOLENCE changes
from 2 to 0. We say that effectprobability ((b1, 2, 0), 0.5) takes place,
if (b1, 2, 0) takes place with probability 0.5.
Denition 4. Let I = (O, o*, A, D, ) be a behavioral information system.
An actionable behavioral rule is dened as a pair r = (S, C) where C is a

Table 1
Function in behavioral information system I.

o*
o1
o2
o3
o4
o5
o6
o7
o8
o9
o10

ORSTPOLSUP

ORGCULTGR

DEMORGVIOLENCE

TRANSVIOLENCE

e1

e2

b1

b2

1
1
1
1
1
0
0
0
0
0
0

1
1
0
0
0
1
1
1
0
0
0

2
2
2
1
1
1
2
2
0
0
1

2
2
1
2
2
1
1
1
0
1
0

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P. Su et al. / Decision Support Systems 54 (2012) 142152

nite nonempty set of effectprobabilities, |C| = a Abe|Da|, and S is an

action set. An actionable behavioral rule r = (S, C) suggests that if S
holds, each effectprobability in C will take place.
Example. ({(e1, 1, 0)}, {((b1, 2, 0), 1/3), ((b1, 2, 1), 1/3),((b1, 2, 2), 1/3),
((b2, 2, 0),1/3), ((b2,2,1),2/3),((b2,2,2),0)}) is an actionable behavioral
rule. It means that if action set {(e1,1,0)} holds, effectprobabilities
((b1,2,0),1/3),((b1,2,1),1/3),((b1,2,2),1/3),((b2,2,0),1/3),((b2,2,1),2/3)
and ((b2,2,2),0) will take place.
Both changing the value of an environment attribute and the
corresponding change of the value of a behavior attribute may bring
benet (positive utility) or incur cost (negative utility) for the user.
In other words, an action or effect may have a positive or negative
utility, which can be estimated by domain experts. Obviously, if the
value of an environment (or behavior) attribute does not change,
the utility of the corresponding action (or effect) is zero.
Denition 5. Let I = (O, o*, A, D, ) be a behavioral information system.
The expected utility of an actionable behavioral rule r = (S, C) is dened
as
utilr utilt utilep:eep:p;
tS

ep C

where util(t) and util(ep. e) denote the utilities of action t and effect ep. e,
respectively. We call an actionable behavioral rule r an interesting
actionable behavioral rule with regard to a user-specied threshold
minutil, if util(r) minutil.
Example. Assume that the utilities of (e1, 1, 0), (e2, 1, 0), (b1, 2,0),
(b1, 2, 1), (b2, 2, 0), and (b2, 2, 1) are 1, 2, 5, 2, 3, and 1, respectively.
The expected utility of ({(e1, 1, 0)}, {((b1, 2, 0), 1/3), ((b1, 2, 1), 1/3),
((b1,2, 2),1/3),((b2,2, 0),1/3),((b2,2, 1),2/3),((b2,2, 2), 0)}) is u((e1,1,
0))+u((b1,2, 0))1/3+u((b1,2, 1))1/3+u((b2,2, 0))1/3+u((b2,2,
1))2/3=3.
The actionable behavioral rule ({(e1,1,0)},{((b1,2, 0),2/9), ((b1,2, 1),
1/3),((b1, 2, 2), 4/9),((b2,2, 0),2/9),((b2, 2, 1), 7/9), ((b2,2, 2), 0)}) suggests the following. If ORSTPOLSUP is changed from level 1 to 0, the
DOMORGVIOLENCE of Hezbollah will change from level 2 to 0 with a
probability of 2/9, or to 1 with a probability of 1/3, or remain unchanged
with a probability of 4/9, and TRANSVIOLTARG of Hezbollah will change
from level 2 to 0 with a probability of 2/9, or to 1 with a probability of 7/9,
or remain unchanged with a probability of 0.
Now we have formally dened actionable behavioral rules. The
problem of mining actionable behavioral rules is to mine all reliable
and interesting actionable behavioral rules from a behavioral information system. The threshold minsup is used to assure that the rules are
not found by chance. The threshold minutil is used to assure that the
rules are sufciently beneciary to warrant deliberation by the user.
3. Mining algorithms
We have developed two algorithms, named MABR-1 and MABR-2
(for Mining Actionable Behavioral Rules). In this section, we describe
the algorithms in detail.
3.1. The MABR-1 algorithm
Table 2 outlines the algorithm MABR-1, which consists of three
phases, candidate actionable behavioral rule generation, rule pruning
and interesting actionable behavioral rule generation.
3.1.1. Candidate rule generation
In this phase, rstly, all frequent action sets are generated. Then,
actionable behavioral rules with frequent action sets are generated.
The generation of frequent action sets is similar to the procedure of
generating frequent item sets in the Apriori algorithm for association

rule mining [1]. The key idea lies in the downward-closed property
of the support of an action set. That is, if an action set has a support
above minsup, all of its subsets (i.e., general action sets) have supports
above minsup. This property is used to effectively reduce the number
of potential frequent action sets that need to be checked.
Starting from frequent 1-action sets (by calling function Select in
Line 1), the algorithm iteratively nds frequent 2-action sets, 3-action
sets, and so forth, until there is no frequent k-action sets (Lines 36).
During each iteration, the set of frequent k-action sets is used to generate a set of potential frequent (k + 1)-action sets (by calling function
Generate in Line 4), which is then checked by computing the supports
based on the dataset (by calling function Select in Line 5). With each
frequent action set, a candidate actionable behavioral rule is generated
(by calling function CR_Construct in Line 9). The outcome of phase 1 is
the set of candidate actionable behavioral rules.
3.1.2. Rule pruning
In the previous phase, all action combinations are considered in
turn as a rule's condition. Therefore, the candidate rules may share
actions in their conditions, and for this reason there could be several
rules with same standard actions, and different non-standard actions,
consequences and expected utilities. Thus to deal with this problem,
the candidate rules generated are pruned in this phase based on the
following denitions.
Denition 6. Let I = (O, o*, A, D, ) be a behavioral information system.
We say that actionable behavioral rule r is a general rule with regard to
another actionable behavioral rule r' and r ' is a specic rule with regard
to r, if r. S is a proper subset of r'. S and r '. S \ r. S contains non-standard
actions only. We call r R a most specic rule in the actionable behavioral
rule set R if for any specic rule r' with regard to r, r' R.
Example. ({(e1, 1, 0)}, {((b1, 2, 0), 1/3), ((b1, 2, 1), 1/3), ((b1, 2, 2), 1/3),
((b2, 2, 0), 1/3), ((b2, 2, 1), 2/3), ((b2, 2, 2), 0)}) is a general rule with
regard to ({(e1, 1, 0), (e2, 1, 1)},{((b1, 2, 0), 0), ((b1, 2, 1), 1/3), ((b1, 2, 2),
2/3), ((b2, 2, 0), 0), ((b2, 2, 1), 1), ((b2, 2, 2), 0)}).
Denition 7. Let I = (O, o*, A, D, ) be a behavioral information system.
A binary equivalence relation ~ on an actionable behavioral rule set R is
dened as follows. For any cr1, cr2 R, cr1 ~ cr2, if for any standard action
a cr1. S, a cr2. S, and for any standard action b cr2. S, b cr1. S. A
consolidated rule with regard to a largest equivalence class L of ~ on R
is dened as an actionable behavioral rule r where r. S = {a cr
Lcr. S|a is a standard action} and for any ep r. C, ep. p = f q:p
crL
supcr:S= supl:S, where fq cr. C and fq. e = ep. e.
lL

Example. ({(e1, 1, 0)}, {((b1, 2, 0), 1/3), ((b1, 2, 1), 1/3), ((b1, 2, 2), 1/3),
((b2, 2, 0), 1/3), ((b2, 2, 1), 2/3), ((b2, 2, 2), 0)}) is equivalent to ({(e1, 1,
0), (e2, 1, 1)}, {((b1, 2, 0), 0), ((b1, 2, 1), 1/3), ((b1, 2, 2), 2/3), ((b2, 2, 0), 0),
((b2, 2, 1), 1), ((b2, 2, 2), 0)}), but is not equivalent to ({(e1, 1, 0), (e2,1,0)},
{((b1, 2, 0), 2/3), ((b1, 2, 1), 1/3), ((b1, 2, 2), 0), ((b2, 2, 0), 2/3), ((b2, 2,
1), 1/3), ((b2, 2, 2), 0)}).({(e1, 1, 0)}, {((b1, 2, 0), 2/9), ((b1, 2, 1), 1/3),
((b1, 2, 2), 4/9), ((b2, 2, 0), 2/9), ((b2, 2, 1), 7/9), ((b2, 2, 2), 0)}) is a
consolidated actionable behavioral rule pertinent to the only largest
equivalence class of ~ on


 9
8
b1 ; 2; 0; 1=3; b1 ; 2; 1; 1=3; b1 ; 2; 2; 1=3;
>
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b2 ; 2; 0; 1=3; b2 ; 2; 1; 2=3; b2 ; 2; 2; 0  :
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1;
0
;
b

;
2;
0
;
0
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b
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2;
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1=3
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b
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2;
2
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2=3
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1
1
1
1
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e2 ; 1; 1
b2 ; 2; 0; 0; b2 ; 2; 1; 1; b2 ; 2; 2; 0

If a candidate actionable behavioral rule is not a most specic rule,

delete it (Line 11). If a largest equivalence class of ~ on the set of
candidate actionable behavioral rules has more than one element,
consolidate all its elements into a consolidated rule (Lines 1213).

P. Su et al. / Decision Support Systems 54 (2012) 142152

145

Table 2
The MABR-1 algorithm.

3.1.3. Interesting rule generation

This phase generates interesting actionable behavioral rules based
on the rules after pruning. A rule is included in the nal output if its
expected utility is above minutil (Lines 1517).

{(e1, 1, 0), (e2, 1, 1)}, {(e1, 1, 0), (e2, 1, 0)}} is generated. Fourth, the
set of the most specic frequent action sets {{(e1, 1, 1), (e2, 1, 0)},
{(e1, 1, 0), (e2, 1, 1)}, {(e1, 1, 0), (e2, 1, 0)}} is generated. Fifth, the set
of the candidate actionable behavioral rules

Example. Following previous examples, suppose that minsup and

minutil are set to 3 and 2, respectively. The running of MABR-1
can be roughly described as follows. First, the set of frequent 1-action
sets {{(e1, 1, 1)},{(e1, 1, 0)}, {(e2, 1, 1)}, {(e2,1, 0)}} is generated. Second,
the set of the potential frequent 2-action sets {{(e1,1, 1),(e2,1, 1)},{(e1,
1, 1),(e2, 1, 0)}, {(e1, 1, 0), (e2, 1, 1)}, {(e1, 1, 0), (e2, 1, 0)}} is generated. Third, the set of the frequent 2-action sets {{(e1, 1, 1), (e2, 1, 0)},



 9
8 

e1 ; 1; 1;
b1 ; 2; 0; 0; b1 ; 2; 1; 2=3; b1 ; 2; 2; 1=3;
>
>
>
;
;>
>
>
>
e ; 1; 0 
b2 ; 2; 0; 0; b2 ; 2; 1; 1=3; b2 ; 2; 2; 2=3  >
>
>
>
>
< 
2
=
e1 ; 1; 0;
b1 ; 2; 0; 0; b1 ; 2; 1; 1=3; b1 ; 2; 2; 2=3;
;
;
e ; 1; 1 
b2 ; 2; 0; 0; b2 ; 2; 1; 1; b2 ; 2; 2; 0  >
>
>
>
> 
2
>
>
>
>
>
e1 ; 1; 0;
b1 ; 2; 0; 2=3; b1 ; 2; 1; 1=3; b1 ; 2; 2; 0;
>
>
:
;
;
e2 ; 1; 0
b2 ; 2; 0; 2=3; b2 ; 2; 1; 1=3; b2 ; 2; 2; 0

146

P. Su et al. / Decision Support Systems 54 (2012) 142152

is generated. Finally, the set of the interesting actionable behavioral

rules with expected utilities


  9
8 
b1 ; 2; 0; 0; b1 ; 2; 1; 1=3; b1 ; 2; 2; 2=3;
>
>
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fe1 ; 1; 0g;
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b

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2;
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b
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2
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10
>
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e1 ; 1; 0;
b1 ; 2; 0; 2=3; b1 ; 2; 1; 1=3; b1 ; 2; 2; 0;
>
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;
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e2 ; 1; 0
b2 ; 2; 0; 2=3; b2 ; 2; 1; 1=3; b2 ; 2; 2; 0
3

is generated and returned as the nal output.

3.2. The MABR-2 algorithm
The most computationally expensive part of MABR-1 is its rst
phase, where frequent action sets with increasing cardinalities need
to be iteratively identied. At each iteration, potential frequent action
sets are rst generated by merging frequent action sets found in the
previous iteration. A complete scan of the behavioral information system
is then carried out to compute the supports of the potential frequent
action sets at the current iteration. This process of repeatedly scanning
the database is time consuming. In a circumstance involving a behavioral
information system with many attributes and/or many attribute values,
and a very low support threshold, the number of potential frequent
action sets at each iteration can be enormous and MABR-1 may consume
considerable time.
Compared to MABR-1, MABR-2, outlined in Table 3, is much more
scalable and efcient. It avoids potential frequent action sets
generation-and-test and uses an FA-tree data structure to signicantly
reduce the computational cost. Based on the denition of FP-tree, which
has been shown to allow highly efcient and scalable association rule
mining [7], we dene FA-tree, conditional subtree, and conditional
FA-tree as follows.

information system. The steps for rule pruning and interesting rules
generation (Lines 1521) are identical to those in MABR-1. The recursive
procedure Insert (Lines 2332) inserts the sorted frequent 1-action sets
supported by an observation into the FA-tree. The recursive procedure
Construct (Lines 3343) constructs all frequent k-action sets (k >1).
The size (number of nodes) of an FA-tree is bounded by jLoj
oO

1 and the height of the tree is bounded by MAXo O|L(o)| + 1, where

L(o) denotes the list of frequent action sets supported by observation
o (derived from Lines 68). This means that the size of an FA-tree is
bounded by the size of the behavioral information system. As the lists
of frequent action sets supported by different observations may share
the same items, the size of the tree is usually much smaller than the
size of the behavioral information system.
Example. Following previous examples, suppose that minsup and
minutil are set to 3 and 2, respectively. The running of MABR-2 can
be roughly described as follows. First, the frequent 1-action sets
{(e1, 1, 0)}, {(e2, 1, 0)}, {(e1, 1, 1)}, and {(e2, 1, 1)} are generated. Second, the FA-tree T is constructed (Fig. 1(a)). For simplicity, a symbol
like " (a, vf, vt) " such as " (e1, 1, 0) " is used to denote an action set
{(a, vf, vt)}. Third, the conditional subtree and conditional FA-tree of
T.header [4] (Fig. 1(b)) are constructed and then frequent action set
{(e2, 1, 1), (e1, 1, 0)} is generated. Fourth, the conditional subtree and
conditional FA-tree of T.header [3] (Fig. 1(c)) are constructed and
then frequent action set {(e1, 1, 1), (e2, 1, 0)} is generated. Fifth, the
conditional subtree and conditional FA-tree of T.header [2] (Fig. 1(d))
are constructed and then frequent action set {(e2, 1, 0), (e1, 1, 0)} is
generated. Sixth, the set of the most specic frequent action sets
{{(e2, 1, 1), (e1, 1, 0)}, {(e1, 1, 1), (e2, 1, 0)}, {(e2,1, 0), (e1, 1, 0)}} is generated. The rest is identical to the last two steps of the previous running
example for MABR-1.

Denition 8. Let I = (O, o*, A, D, ) be a behavioral information system.

An FA-tree (for frequent action set) is a tree structure such that:
1. It consists of a root, a set of 1-action-set-prex subtrees as the children of the root, and a header list.
2. Each node in the 1-action-set-prex subtree consists of four elds:
1-action-set, count, next, and parent. The 1-action-set eld carries a
1-action set. The count eld registers the number of observations
in O supporting the union of the 1-action sets carried by the
nodes on the path from the root to this node. The next eld links
to the next node in the FA-tree sharing the same 1-action-set,
forming a linked list. The parent eld links to the parent node.
3. Each item in the header list consists of two elds: 1-action-set and
rst. The 1-action-set eld carries a 1-action set. The rst eld
points to the rst node in the FA-tree carrying the corresponding
1-action set.
Denition 9. Let I = (O, o*, A, D, ) be a behavioral information system
and T be an FA-tree pertinent to I. The conditional subtree of in
T. header is dened as a subtree of T, consisting of the nodes carrying
the same 1-action-set as and the paths from these nodes to the
root. The conditional FA-tree of is dened as an FA-tree under the
condition of the existence of and can be constructed based on the
conditional subtree of .
MABR-2 tends to be much more efcient and scalable than MARB-1
for two main reasons. First, MABR-2 only scans the behavioral information system a few times. Second, the size of the FA-tree tends to
be much smaller than that of the behavioral information system.
MABR-2 adopts a variant of the FP-growth method [7] and takes
only three scans of the behavioral information system in all. The
rst scan collects the set of frequent 1-action sets (Line 1). The second
scan constructs the FA-tree (Lines 210). The third scan generates the
candidate actionable behavioral rules (Lines 1214). Generating the
set of frequent action sets based on the FA-tree (Line 11) and pruning
rules (Lines 1518) do not require scanning of the behavioral

4. Experimental study
We have fully implemented our proposed approach to actionable
behavioral rule mining. In this section, we empirically validate our
approach, show an interesting example of the mined rules, and compare the running times of MABR-1 and MABR-2.

4.1. Experimental setup

We conduct an experiment with the benchmark MAROB datasets.1
The MAROB datasets cover several ethnopolitical organizations in the
Middle East and North Africa. The datasets keep track of several attributes on a yearly basis from 1980 to 2004. The attributes can be broadly
classied into two groups, behavioral and environmental. The former
represents the behaviors of an organization in previous years while
the latter characterizes the environment in which the organization
situates.
We experimented with the data in MAROB and extracted three
sub datasets about the Hezbollah organization in Lebanon, the
Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran, and the Iraqi Communist Party, respectively. We chose three behavior attributes, DOMORGVIOLENCE,
TRANSVIOLTARG and TRANSVIOLOC, and several environment attributes that are deemed to have causal inuence upon the behavior attributes. The meanings and values of these attributes are given in
Appendix A. Utility values of the possible actions and effects from the
viewpoints of the corresponding governments were elicited from
human analysts and normalized into the range of [1, 1] (the utility
values we use are omitted here, but available from the authors upon
request).
1
The Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior Datasets: http://www.cidcm.umd.
edu/mar.

P. Su et al. / Decision Support Systems 54 (2012) 142152

147

Table 3
The MABR-2 algorithm.

4.2. Baseline approach

An actionable behavioral rule r = (S, C) suggests that if S holds, each
effectprobability in C will take place. The key difference among
approaches is the effectprobabilities. In other words, for an action
set, different approaches may yield different sets of effectprobabilities.
A natural design of the baseline approach is to follow random
guessing using the true distributions of the class labels. Intuitively,

it estimates the effectprobabilities with the true distributions of

the values of behavior attributes. That is, given that an action set
holds, it estimates the probability of an effect e = (a, vf, vt) taking
place at the proportion of observations with vt as its a value.
Formally, the baseline approach constructs the actionable behavioral
rule based on a frequent action set as follows. Let I = (O, o*, A,D, ) be a
behavioral information system. For any frequent action set S, actionable
behavioral rule r = (S, C) is constructed, where for any a Abe and v Da

148

P. Su et al. / Decision Support Systems 54 (2012) 142152

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

Fig. 1. Illustration of running MABR-II. (a) FA-tree T, conditional subtrees and conditional FA-trees of: (b) T.header [4], (c) T.header [3], (d) T.header [2], (e) T.header [1].

there exists an effectprobability ((a, (o*, a), v), |{o O|(o, a) = v}|/|O|)
C. Note that the expected utility of r is computed using Eq. (1).
4.3. Evaluation criterion
Let au be the actual utility when an action set S are taken actually.
Let eu be the expected utility of the consolidate actionable behavioral
rule with S as its antecedent our approach generates or the rule the
baseline approach generates with S. Certainly, we want the absolute
difference between eu and au to be as small as possible. Thus, we
use the mean absolute error (MAE), a standard measure for assessing
the closeness between predictions and eventual outcomes, as the
criterion for evaluating the performance of our approach and the
baseline approach. The MAE is given by
n
1X
jeui aui j;
n i1

where eui is the expected utility our approach or the baseline

approach estimates and aui is the actual utility. Typically, domain
experts in security informatics set the MAE threshold to a reasonable
value around 0.07 for eld evaluation.
In each year, the Lebanese government may take some actions to
restrain terroristic behaviors of Hezbollah. The same goes for the
other governmentorganization pairs. These actions and their effects

have been recorded in the MAROB dataset. Thus, the actual utility of
the actions can be computed according to the observations for this
year and the previous year. If for this year, our approach can give
the consolidated actionable behavioral rule cr with the same actions
as the actual ones taken by the government, then the absolute difference between the actual utility and the expected utility of cr or the
rule the baseline approach generates with the actual actions should
be considered. Note that the input parameter O includes all the observations for years from 1982 to 2004 except for this year.
4.4. Experimental results
Table 4 shows the experimental results on the three sub MAROB
datasets with 31 actual action sets that are antecedent of some
consolidated actionable behavioral rules. Note that there is no other
actual action set that is antecedent of any consolidated rule. The
table entries present the actual utilities, the absolute errors of the
baseline approach and the MABR algorithms, with minsup set to 5.
For the absolute errors, the means and standard deviations are
presented.
Note that although the utilities of actionable behavioral rulesinduced actions and effects were assigned by the experts in a subjective
fashion, what is actually compared in our experiment is the absolute
difference between the actual utility and the expected utility of the
action set induced by a rule. For the same action set, different methods

P. Su et al. / Decision Support Systems 54 (2012) 142152

0.6, or remain unchanged with a probability of 0.4. This actionable

behavioral rule has an expected utility of 0.12.

Action
set

Actual
utility

Absolute error
Baseline

MABRs

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
Mean
SD

0.006
0.246
0.194
0.072
0.008
0.012
0.000
0.003
0.004
0.064
0.004
0.016
0.006
0.003
0.154
0.017
0.016
0.004
0.086
0.011
0.011
0.006
0.077
0.084
0.077
0.071
0.004
0.120
0.011
0.010
0.117

0.091
0.184
0.298
0.056
0.107
0.103
0.115
0.112
0.111
0.179
0.111
0.099
0.109
0.112
0.269
0.098
0.099
0.111
0.175
0.015
0.015
0.015
0.062
0.175
0.062
0.062
0.098
0.213
0.027
0.027
0.142
0.092
0.118

0.085
0.123
0.119
0.064
0.080
0.071
0.057
0.093
0.118
0.000
0.041
0.000
0.053
0.000
0.147
0.041
0.093
0.041
0.012
0.012
0.012
0.015
0.024
0.003
0.032
0.024
0.089
0.089
0.062
0.047
0.024
0.054
0.069

will yield different estimated probability distributions over the effects

or outcomes. Generally speaking, the closer the estimated distribution
of a rule's effects is to the actual realization, the closer the estimated
utility is to the actual utility.
The experimental results show the validity of our approach. From
Table 4, we can see that the MAE of our approach is much less than
the validity threshold 0.07. Meanwhile, we can see that our approach
signicantly outperforms the baseline approach, as the MAE value of
our approach is almost 50% less than that of the baseline approach.
Here we show an example rule mined using MABRs on Hezbollah,
with minsup, minutil, and o set to 8, 0.05, and the observation of year
2003, respectively. It is
8
>
>
>
BB

>
 >
<
BB
BB e2 ; 1; 0;
;
BB
BB e3 ; 0; 2 >
>
>
@@
>
>
:

b1 ; 2; 0; 0:3; b1 ; 2; 1; 0; b1 ; 2; 2; 0:7;
b1 ; 2; 3; 0; b1 ; 2; 4; 0; b1 ; 2; 5; 0;
b2 ; 2; 0; 0:1; b2 ; 2; 1; 0; b2 ; 2; 2; 0:6;
b2 ; 2; 3; 0:2; b2 ; 2; 4; 0:1; b2 ; 2; 5; 0;
b3 ; 5; 0; 0:6; b3 ; 5; 1; 0; b3 ; 5; 2; 0;
b3 ; 5; 3; 0; b3 ; 5; 4; 0; b3 ; 5; 5; 0:4

91
1
>
>
>
>
C
C
>
=C
C
C
C
C; 0:12C:
>
C
C
>A
>
A
>
>
;

The symbols in the rule and corresponding attributes are listed in

Appendix A. This rule provides the following proposal of actions to
the Lebanon government:
If DIAFINSUP is changed from level 1 to 0 and ORGCULTGR is
changed from level 0 to 2, the DOMORGVIOLENCE of Hezbollah
will change from level 2 to 0 with a probability of 0.3, or remain
unchanged with a probability of 0.7, TRANSVIOLTARG of
Hezbollah will change from level 2 to 0 with a probability of 0.1,
or to 3 with a probability of 0.2, or to 4 with a probability of 0.1,
or remain unchanged with a probability of 0.6, and TRANSVIOLOC
of Hezbollah will change from level 5 to 0 with a probability of

4.5. Comparison of MABR algorithms

Fig. 2 contrasts the running times of MABR-1 and MABR-2 on
Hezbollah as minsup increases from 8 to 23 (The results on the
other two sub datasets are quite similar, and the parameter minutil
has little effect on the running time from our experimental ndings.).
MABR-2 appears to be more efcient and scalable than MABR-1.
When minsup is low, the advantage of MABR-2 over MABR-1 is especially notable. When minsup is 8, the running time of MABR-2 is only
0.07% of that of MABR-1. As minsup goes up, this advantage becomes
less prominent. The reason is that large frequent action sets become
unusual for high minsup.
5. Related work
While there is no previous work on mining actionable rules specifically for inuencing entity behaviors, there have been several investigations into other types of actionable knowledge discovery.
Actionable knowledge usually takes the form of actionable rules. A
rule is considered actionable if users can take an action to their
advantage directly based on this rule [14].
For example, to improve the protability of customers of a bank,
action rules constructed from certain pairs of classication rules
were proposed in Ref. [21]. Attributes are categorized into two
types, stable and exible. The former (latter) includes the attributes
whose values cannot (can) be changed or inuenced by a bank.
Rules are extracted from a decision table giving preference to exible
attributes. This class of rules forms a special repository of rules from
which new rules called action rules are constructed. An action is
taken when a change in a exible attribute is encountered. An action
rule is dened as a term [()( )] ( ), where is a conjunction of values of stable attributes, ( ) represents proposed
changes in values of exible attributes, and ( ) is a desired effect
of the action. The discovered knowledge provides an insight into how
the values of some attributes need to be changed so that the undesirable
objects can be shifted to a desirable group.
A change of attribute value may incur cost. In Ref. [26], the notion
of cost and feasibility of an action rule was proposed and a search
graph based method for constructing feasible action rules at the lowest
cost was given. In Ref. [20], interesting action rules were dened as the
rules of the lowest cost. In Ref. [19], a heuristic strategy for constructing
interesting action rules was proposed. In Ref. [27], a method, which
combines the action forest algorithm for extracting action rules and a
heuristic strategy, was proposed for generating interesting action rules.
Despite their differences in choosing classication algorithms, the
above-mentioned methods on mining action rules all produce an
100

Running time (seconds)

Table 4
Comparison of the results by different approaches.

00

149

MABR-1
MABR-2

80
60
40
20
0
8

10

12

14

16

18

20

minsup
Fig. 2. Running time with minsup.

22

24

150

P. Su et al. / Decision Support Systems 54 (2012) 142152

actionable rule based on a certain pair of classication rules or a single

classication rule. A main shortcoming of this strategy is that some
interesting actionable rules can be missed. To address this problem,
another strategy was proposed in a support-condence-cost framework for discovering action rules directly from a database [8]. In Ref.
[18], an approach was proposed to generate association-type action
rules. In Ref. [17], a bottom-up strategy was proposed to discover
action rules without using pre-existing classication rules.
In Ref. [29], to help devise a direct-marketing plan in order to
increase the prot of an institution, a lazy approach was proposed
to use role models for generating advice and plans. The role models
are typical cases that form a case base and can be used for customer
advice generation. For each new customer seeking advice, a nearestneighbor algorithm is used to nd a cost-effective and highly probable
plan for switching a customer to the most desirable role model. Such a
method does not provide rules in advance and will incur high computation costs when generating action suggestions.
To discover actionable knowledge for customer relationship management (CRM), methods were proposed to suggest actions to
reclassify a customer from an undesired status to a desired one while
post-processing decision trees to maximum expected net prot
[13,30]. However, these methods could miss some actions with higher
net prot. To handle this problem, multiple trees with different subsets
of hard attributes need to be built [13]. To get optimal actions, the
number of trees could be very large, especially when there are many
hard attributes.
In addition, in Ref. [6], a formal view of actionable knowledge
discovery (AKD) is presented from the system and decision-making
perspectives, and correspondingly four types of generic AKD frameworks proposed, formalized, and illustrated.
Another line of related work is on associative classication (AC),
which integrates two data mining tasks, association rule discovery
and classication, to build a prediction model (classier). AC algorithms
normally derive a large set of rules, many of which are redundant or
misleading [15,12]. Several pruning methods have been used to reduce
the size of associative classiers. Most AC algorithms use rule ranking
procedures for rule pruning. One important parameter used to determine the precedence of the rules is rule antecedent length. Some AC
algorithms, such as those in Refs. [12,28,2], tend to prefer general
rules (those with shorter antecedent) and consequently suffer poor
classication accuracy. On the contrary, other algorithms, such as
those in Refs. [4,3], which tend to prefer specic rules, reduce the
chance of misclassication. The strategy to rene the generated rule
set so as to acquire quality rules is also an important issue in mining
actionable behavioral rules.
An AC rule can be represented as [] (), where represents
values of feature attributes, and is a value of a decision attribute.
In contrast with actionable rule mining, AC and other traditional
rule-based classication do not consider changes of attribute values.
Therefore, in both problem denition and formalism, traditional
classication methods do not provide actionable suggestions on how
attributes need to be changed to cater to the user's interest.

Nonetheless, previous work on mining actionable rules is incapable

of mining actionable behavioral rules we identify. The goal of previous
approaches is to reclassify some member objects of an entity (e.g. customers of a company) from an undesired decision class to a desired
one for the user's interest, while our approach is aimed to change an
entity's multiple behavioral attribute (e.g. attacks conducted by a radical
group) values from current observations for the user's interest.
In the framework we propose, an actionable behavioral rule takes
the form of [( )] [( , p)], where p represents the probabilities
of corresponding effects of the action. There are two main differences in
the forms of previous actionable rules and the behavioral rule in our
approach. First, the and in our rule are the attribute values associated
with the current observation. Second, previous approaches can only process a single decision attribute with two possible values, while for our
problem, our approach handles multiple behavior attributes, each of
which may have multiple possible values. As a result, from the formalism to the method we develop, our actionable behavioral rule mining
approach is different from previous approaches. Table 5 provides a comparison of different approaches.
To the best of our knowledge, there is no previous related work on
actionable rule mining providing validation of the proposed approaches.
Thus, the quality of mined rules can only be evaluated by domain
experts. Through developing appropriate evaluation criteria, we give
the empirical validation of our proposed approach, which may also
shed some light on the related work. Nevertheless, developing more
rigorous evaluation criteria and approaches still deserves extensive
further research.
6. Conclusions
In this paper, we have formally formulated the problem of mining
actionable behavioral rules pertinent to an entityan individual,
group, organization, or country. The proposed actionable behavior
rules provide the user explicit suggestions of actions to inuence the behaviors of the entity in concern with satisfactory utility to the user. The
problem may nd valuable applications in many domains, such as
counter-terrorism, marketing, and human resource management. We
have also proposed two algorithms for solving this new problem and
conducted an experiment, which strongly recommends the validity of
our proposed approach, and shows the practical value of our dened
problem and the comparative performance of the algorithms.
Our work has established a new important data mining problem
and opened up several avenues for further research. First, while we
have focused on categorical attributes and assumed that numerical
attributes (if any) are discretized in advance, further research may
investigate more sophisticated treatments of numerical attributes.
Second, while we have conducted a preliminary experiment using
domain datasets, more comprehensive experiments with many large
datasets drawn from various domains can be conducted to validate
the generalizability of our ndings. Third, another direction is to design
and evaluate more efcient and scalable algorithms for mining actionable behavioral rules.

Table 5
Comparison of our approach and previous approaches.

Object representation in dataset

Decision attribute
Decision attribute value
Need minimum condence
Need minimum support
Need action utility value specied by expert
Rule form/output
Expected direct consequence of suggested action

Our approach

Previous actionable rule mining

Traditional classication

Observations of an entity
Multiple
Multiple
No
Yes
Yes
[( )] [( , p)]
Change the behavior of an entity

Member objects of an entity

Single
Two
Yes
Yes
Yes
[()( )] ( )
Reclassify some member objects of an entity

Observations of an entity
Single
Multiple
Yes
Yes
No
[] ()
None

P. Su et al. / Decision Support Systems 54 (2012) 142152

Acknowledgments

151

Table A1 (continued)
Behavior attributes

This work is supported in part by the National Natural Science

Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 60921061, 61175040,
71025001, 90924302 and 91024030, and the Research Fund of State
Key Laboratory of Management and Control for Complex Systems
under Grant No. 20110102.

Appendix A
Table A1: Selected attributes in the MAROB datasets.

Behavior attributes
Name
DOMORGVIOLENCE
Code
b1
Meaning To what degree the organization uses violence domestically as a
strategy?
Value
Label
0
Organization is not using violence as a strategy
1
Organization is using violence as occasional strategy but is not
specically targeting persons (coded if organization targets
infrastructure and/or gives warnings before attacks)
2
Organization is using violence regularly as a strategy but is targeting
security personnel (including state security personnel and non-state
armed militias) and not government non-security personnel or civilians
3
Organization is using violence regularly as a strategy but is targeting
security personnel(including state security personnel and non-state
armed militias) and/or government non-security personnel, but not
civilians
4
Organization is occasionally targeting civilians but most of its violent
acts target security personnel or government non-security personnel
5
Organization is targeting civilians regularly
Name
TRANSVIOLTARG
Code
b2
Meaning To what degree the organization uses violence to target transnational
entities as a strategy?
Value
Label
0
Organization is not using transnational violence as a strategy
1
Organization is using transnational violence as occasional strategy but is
not specically targeting persons (coded if organization targets
infrastructure and/or gives warnings before attacks)
2
Organization is using transnational violence regularly as a strategy but
is targeting security personnel (including state security personnel and
non-state armed militias) and not government non-security personnel
or civilians
3
Organization is using transnational violence regularly as a strategy but
is targeting security personnel (including state security personnel and
non-state armed militias) and/or government non-security personnel,
but not civilians
4
Organization is using transnational violence occasionally targeting
civilians but most of its violent acts target security personnel or
government non-security personnel
5
Organization is using transnational violence to target civilians regularly
Name
TRANSVIOLOC
Code
b3
Meaning To what degree the organization uses violence transnationally outside
the boundaries of the state in which the group lives?
Value
Label
0
Organization is not using transnational violence as a strategy
1
Organization is using transnational violence as occasional strategy but is
not specically targeting persons (coded if organization targets
infrastructure and/or gives warnings before attacks)
2
Organization is using transnational violence regularly as a strategy but
is targeting security personnel (including state security personnel and
non-state armed militias) and not government non-security personnel
or civilians
Value
Label
3
Organization is using transnational violence regularly as a strategy but
is targeting security personnel (including state security personnel and
non-state armed militias) and/or government non-security personnel,
but not civilians
4
Organization is using transnational violence occasionally targeting
civilians but most of its violent acts target security personnel or
government non-security personnel

Organization is using transnational violence to target civilians regularly

Environment attributes
Name
ORSTPOLSUP
Code
e1
Meaning Did foreign state provide political support?
Value
Label
0
No
1
Yes
Name
DIAFINSUP
Code
e2
Meaning Did diaspora provide non-military nancial support?
Value
Label
0
No
1
Yes
Name
ORGCULTGR
Code
e3
Meaning Code the dominant cultural grievance of the organization.
Value
Label
0
No expressed cultural grievances
1
Cultural grievances focused on elimination of discrimination
2
Cultural grievances focused on creating or strengthening economic
remedial policies (i.e., establishing or increasing state funding for
cultural protection and/or promotion)

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Peng Su received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Application Technology from the Chinese Academy of Sciences
in 2011. He is a lecturer in the School of Management Engineering at Shandong Jianzhu University. Dr. Su is a
member of IFAC Technical Committees on Economic and
Business Systems (TC9.1). His research interests mainly
focus on data mining and social computing.

Wenji Mao received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science

from the University of Southern California in 2006. She is
an associate professor at the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Prof. Mao is a member of ACM
and AAAI, and a senior member of the China Computer
Federation. Her research interests include articial intelligence, multi-agent systems and social modeling.

Daniel Zeng received his Ph.D. degree in Industrial Administration from the Carnegie Mellon University in
1998. He is an associate professor and the director of the
Intelligent Systems and Decisions Laboratory in the Department of Management Information Systems at the University of Arizona's Eller College of Management. He is
also an afliated professor at the Institute of Automation,
Chinese Academy of Sciences. Prof. Zeng is a member of
IEEE. His research interests include software agents and
multi-agent systems, intelligence and security informatics,
social computing and recommender systems.

Huimin Zhao received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in automation from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1990
and 1993, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in management information systems from the University of Arizona,
Tucson, Arizona, USA in 2002. He is an Associate Professor
of management information systems in the Sheldon B.
Lubar School of Business at the University of Wisconsin
Milwaukee. His current research interests include data
mining and recommendation systems. He is a member of
the IEEE, the Association for Information Systems (AIS),
and the Information Resources Management Association
(IRMA).