Set-valued information systems

Set-valued information systems are generalized models of single-valued information systems. Incomplete information systems can be viewed as disjunctively interpreted set-valued information systems. Since some objects in set-valued information systems may have more than one value for an attribute, so we define tolerance relation and use the maximal tolerance classes to classify the universe of discourse. In order to derive optimal decision rules from set-valued decision information systems, we propose the concept of relative reduct of maximal tolerance classes, and define a kind of discernibility function to compute the relative reduct by Boolean reasoning techniques. Finally, we define three kinds of relative reducts for set-valued information systems and used them to evaluate the significance of attributes. (C) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.