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Creator: Vladislav Rajkovic et al. (13 experts)
Donors to UCI ML Repository: Marko Bohanec,
Blaz Zupan
Date: June, 1997
Past Usage
The hierarchical decision model, from which this dataset is derived,
was first presented in
M. Olave, V. Rajkovic, M. Bohanec: An application for admission in public
school systems. In (I. Th. M. Snellen and W. B. H. J. van de Donk and J.-P.
Baquiast, editors) Expert Systems in Public Administration, pages 145-160.
Elsevier Science Publishers (North Holland), 1989.
Within machine-learning, this dataset was used for the evaluation of HINT
(Hiearchy INduction Tool). The results are presented in
and show that HINT is able to completely reconstruct the original
hierarchical model. The
paper further compares the generalization capability of HINT and C4.5.
The learning curve obtained by both learning systems is (p is the percent
of examples used for learning, y axis shows the classification accuracy
when all remaining examples are classified).
Relevant Information
Nursery Database was derived from a hierarchical decision model originally
developed to rank applications for nursery schools. It was used during
several years in 1980's when there was excessive enrollment to these schools
in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and the rejected applications frequently needed
an objective explanation. The final decision depended on three subproblems:
occupation of parents and child's nursery, family structure and financial
standing, and social and health picture of the family. The model was developed
within expert system shell for decision making DEX (M. Bohanec, V. Rajkovic:
Expert system for decision making. Sistemica 1(1), pp. 145-157, 1990.).
The hierarchical model ranks nursery-school applications according to
the following concept structure:
The features used in the structure are:
NURSERY Evaluation of applications for nursery schools
. EMPLOY Employment of parents and child's nursery
. . parents Parents' occupation
. . has_nurs Child's nursery
. STRUCT_FINAN Family structure and financial standings
. . STRUCTURE Family structure
. . . form Form of the family
. . . children Number of children
. . housing Housing conditions
. . finance Financial standing of the family
. SOC_HEALTH Social and health picture of the family
. . social Social conditions
. . health Health conditions
Input attributes are printed in lowercase. Besides the target concept
(NURSERY) the model includes four intermediate concepts: EMPLOY, STRUCT_FINAN,
STRUCTURE, SOC_HEALTH. Every concept is in the original model related to
its lower level descendants by a set of examples click on the intermediate
or target concept - circled in the structure - to see the set of examples
that define it).
The Nursery Database contains examples with the structural information
removed, i.e., directly relates NURSERY to the eight input attributes:
parents, has_nurs, form, children, housing, finance, social, health.
Because of known underlying concept structure, this database may be
particularly useful for testing constructive induction and structure discovery
methods.
Statistics
Number of Instances: 12960 (instances completely cover the attribute
space)
Number of Attributes: 8