C4.5 or Naive Bayes: A Discriminative Model Selection Approach

C4.5 and naive Bayes (NB) are two of the top 10 data mining algorithms thanks to their simplicity, effectiveness, and efficiency. It is well known that NB performs very well on some domains, and poorly on others that involve correlated features. C4.5, on the other hand, typically works better than NB on such domains. To integrate their advantages and avoid their disadvantages, many approaches, such as model insertion and model combination, are proposed. The model insertion approach such as NBTree inserts NB into each leaf of the built decision tree. The model combination approach such as C4.5-NB builds C4.5 and NB on a training dataset independently and then combines their prediction results for an unseen instance. In this paper, we focus on a new view and propose a discriminative model selection approach. For detail, at the training time, C4.5 and NB are built on a training dataset independently, and the most reliable one is recorded for each training instance. At the test time, for each test instance, we firstly find its nearest neighbor and then choose the most reliable model for its nearest neighbor to predict its class label. We simply denote the proposed algorithm as C4.5 parallel to NB. C4.5 parallel to NB retains the interpretability of C4.5 and NB, but significantly outperforms C4.5, NB, NBTree, and C4.5-NB.