The granular structures in formal concept analysis

Abstract

Granular analysis in formal concept analysis is a newly proposed interesting topic. In this paper, we study the granular structures in formal concept analysis. According to the principle of multiview, we define the granules from viewpoints of objects and attributes, respectively. On the basis of the semantic meaning and the function in lattice construction, ten different kinds of granules are given. These ten kinds of granules construct the multilevel granular structures. Then, we define the similarity between each pair of granules in the same level. On the basis of the similarity measurement, we show how to transform granules from one level to another. Finally, an example is presented to illustrate the results we obtain.