Closed patterns and abstraction beyond lattices

Abstract

Recently pattern mining has investigated closure operators in families of subsets of an attribute set that are not lattices. In particular, various authors have investigated closure operators starting from a context, in the Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) sense, in which objects are described as usual according to their relation to attributes, and in which a closed element is a maximal element of the equivalence class of elements sharing the same support, i.e. occurring in the same objects. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First we thoroughly investigate this framework and relate it to FCA, defining in particular a structure called a pre-confluence, weaker than a lattice, in which we can define a closure operator with respect to a set of objects. Second, we show that the requirements allowing us to define abstract concept lattices also allow us to define corresponding abstract Galois pre-confluences. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.