Three-Way Concept Analysis for Incomplete Formal Contexts

Recently, incomplete formal contexts have received more and more attention from the communities of formal concept analysis. Different from a complete context where the binary relations between all the objects and attribute are known, an incomplete formal context has at least a pair of object and attribute with a completely unknown binary relation. Partially known formal concepts use interval sets to indicate the incompleteness. Three-way formal concept analysis is capable of characterizing a target set by combining positive and negative attributes. However, how to describe target set, by pointing out what attributes it has with certainty and what attributes it has with possibility and what attributes it does not has with certainty and what attributes it does not has with possibility, is still an open problem. This paper combines the ideas of three-way formal concept analysis and partially known formal concepts and presents a framework of approximate three-way concept analysis. At first, approximate object-induced and attribute-induced three-way concept lattices are introduced, respectively. And then, the relationship between approximate three-way concept lattice and classical three-way concept lattice are investigated. Finally, examples are presented to demonstrate and verify the obtained results.