This repository provides a Julia library that implements the Disc algorithm. In Boolean data, Disc discovers groups with significantly differing distributions, which are modeled in terms of the maximum entropy distribution over higher-order feature interactions (i.e., patterns). Disc leverages the Desc algorithm to describe groups in terms of concise set of characteristic and informative patterns which highlight commonalities and differences between groups.

The code is a from-scratch implementation of algorithms described in the paper.

Dalleiger, S. and Vreeken, J. 2020. Explainable Data Decompositions. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 3709–3716. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v34i04.5780

Please consider citing the paper.

Contributions are welcome.

To install the library from the REPL:

julia> using Pkg; Pkg.add(url="https://github.com/sdall/disc.git")

To install the library from the command line:

julia -e 'using Pkg; Pkg.add(url="https://github.com/sdall/disc.git")'

To set up the command line interface (CLI) located in bin/disc.jl:

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/sdall/disc

2. Install the required dependencies including the library:

julia -e 'using Pkg; Pkg.add(path="./disc"); Pkg.add.(["Comonicon", "CSV", "GZip", "JSON"])'

A typical usage of the library is, for example:

julia> using Disc: disc_heuristic, disc_greedy, patterns
julia> y, p = disc_heuristic(X; alpha=0.01)
julia> patterns.(p)

julia> y, p = disc_greedy(X)
julia> patterns.(p)

📝 For conciseness, Disc does not use patterns to characterize groups, which are well-characterized by their singletons.

💡 Disc determines the decomposition either greedily or heuristically (faster).

For more information, see the documentation:

help?> disc_heuristic
help?> disc_greedy

A typical usage of the command line interface is:

chmod +x bin/disc.jl
bin/disc.jl dataset.dat.gz dataset.labels.gz > output.json

The output contains a list of patterns per group and labels designating the group of each data point. For further information regarding usage or input format, please see the complete list of CLI options:

bin/disc.jl --help