Efficient Closure Operators for FCA-Based Classification

Abstract

Knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) aims to exploit the large amounts of data collected every day in various fields of computing application. The idea is to extract hidden knowledge from a set of data. It gathers several tasks that constitute a process, such as: data selection, pre-processing, transformation, data mining, visualization, etc. Data mining techniques include supervised classification and unsupervised classification. Classification consists of predicting the class of new instances with a classifier built on learning data of labeled instances. Several approaches were proposed such as: the induction of decision trees, Bayes, nearest neighbor search, neural networks, support vector machines, and formal concept analysis. Learning formal concepts always refers to the mathematical structure of concept lattice. This article presents a state of the art on formal concept analysis classifier. The authors present different ways to calculate the closure operators from nominal data and also present new approach to build only a part of the lattice including the best concepts. This approach is based on Dagging (ensemble method) that generates an ensemble of classifiers, each one represents a formal concept, and combines them by a voting rule. Experimental results are given to prove the efficiency of the proposed method.