If it is to qualify as knowledge, a learner's output should be accurate, stable and comprehensible. Learning multiple models can improve significantly on the accuracy and stability of single models, but at the cost of losing their comprehensibility (when they possess it, as do, for example, simple decision trees and rule sets). This article proposes and evaluates CMM, a meta-learner that seeks to retain most of the accuracy gains of multiple model approaches, while still producing a single comprehensible model. CMM is based on reapplying the base learner to recover the frontiers implicit in the multiple model ensemble. This is done by giving the base learner a new training set, composed of a large number of examples generated and classified according to the ensemble, plus the original examples. CMM is evaluated using C4.5RULES as the base learner, and bagging as the multiple-model methodology. On 26 benchmark datasets, CMM retains on average 60% of the accuracy gains obtained by bagging relative to a single run of C4.5RULES, while producing a rule set whose complexity is typically a small multiple (2–6) of C4.5RULES's, and also improving stability. Further studies show that accuracy and complexity can be traded off by varying the number of artificial examples generated.
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