<![CDATA[Ant colony optimization (ACO) was successfully applied to data mining classification task through ant-mining algorithms. Exploration and exploitation are search strategies that guide the learning process of a classification model and generate a list of rules. Exploitation refers to the process of intensifying the search for neighbors in good regions, whereas exploration aims towards new promising regions during a search process. The existing balance between exploration and exploitation in the rule construction procedure is limited to the roulette wheel selection mechanism, which complicates rule generation. Thus, low-coverage complex rules with irrelevant terms will be generated. This work proposes an enhancement rule pruning procedure for the ACO algorithm that can be used in rule-based classification. This procedure, called the annealing strategy, is an improvement of ant-mining algorithms in the rule construction procedure. Presented as a pre-pruning technique, the annealing strategy deals first with irrelevant terms before creating a complete rule through an annealing schedule. The proposed improvement was tested through benchmarking experiments, and results were compared with those of four of the most related ant-mining algorithms, namely, Ant-Miner, CAnt-Miner, TACO-Miner, and Ant-Miner with hybrid pruner. Results display that our proposed technique achieves better performance in terms of classification accuracy, model size, and computational time. The proposed annealing schedule can be used in other ACO variants for different applications to improve classification accuracy.]]>
