Relations of reduction between covering generalized rough sets and concept lattices

The reduction theory plays an important role in data analysis. This paper studies the relation between the reduction of a covering and the attribute reduction of a concept lattice. The reduction of a covering from the perspective of concept lattices is investigated. Conversely, the attribute reduction of a formal context is studied in the framework of covering generalized rough sets. The results in this paper show that the reduction of a covering can be viewed as the attribute reduction of a derivative formal context. Moreover, every reduct of a given formal context can be seen as the reduct of an induced covering. As an application of the theoretical results, an approach to the attribute reduction of concept lattices based on covering generalized rough sets is proposed. Furthermore, experiments are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.