ROUGH CONCEPT ANALYSIS: A SYNTHESIS OF ROUGH SETS AND FORMAL CONCEPT ANALYSIS

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Kent, Robert E.

Affiliations: Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, Arkansas 72204, U.S.A.

Abstract: The theory introduced, presented and developed in this paper, is concerned with Rough Concept Analysis. This theory is a synthesis of the theory of Rough Sets pioneered by Zdzislaw Pawlak [10] with the theory of Formal Concept Analysis pioneered by Rudolf Wille [11]. The central notion in this paper of a rough formal concept combines in a natural fashion the two notions of rough set and formal concept — to use a slogan: “rough set + formal concept = rough formal concept”. This paper is an extension of the paper [5] presented at the international workshop on Rough Sets and Knowledge Discovery (RSKD'93). A related paper [8] using distributed constraints provides a synthesis of the two important data modeling techniques: conceptual scaling of Formal Concept Analysis, and Entity-Relationship database modeling. A follow-up paper [9] will extend rough concept analysis from formal contexts to distributed constraints.

DOI: 10.3233/FI-1996-272305

Journal: Fundamenta Informaticae, vol. 27, no. 2-3, pp. 169-181, 1996