The Reverse Doubling Construction
Jean-Franc¸ois Viaud
1
, Karell Bertet
1
, Christophe Demko
1
and Rokia Missaoui
2
1
Laboratory L3i, University of La Rochelle, La Rochelle, France
2
University of Qu
´
ebec in Outaouais, Gatineau, Canada
Keywords:
Concept Lattice, Congruence Relation, Factor Lattice, Arrow Relation, Arrow Closed Subcontext, Compatible
Subcontext, Doubling Convex.
Abstract:
It is well known inside the Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) community that a concept lattice could have an
exponential size in the data. Hence, the size of concept lattices is a critical issue in the presence of large
real-life data sets. In this paper, we propose to investigate factor lattices as a tool to get meaningful parts of the
whole lattice. These factor lattices have been widely studied from the early theory of lattices to more recent
work in the FCA field. This paper contains two parts. The first one gives background about lattice theory
and formal concept analysis, and mainly compatible sub-contexts, arrow-closed sub-contexts and congruence
relations. The second part presents a new decomposition called “reverse doubling construction” that exploits
the above three notions used for the doubling convex construction investigated by Day. Theoretical results and
their proofs are given as well as an illustrative example.
1 INTRODUCTION
During the last decade, the computation capabilities
have promoted Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) with
new methods based on concept lattices. Though they
are exponential in space/time in worst case, concept
lattices of a reasonable size enable an intuitive repre-
sentation of data expressed by a formal context that
links objects to attributes through a binary relation.
Methods based on concept lattices have been devel-
oped in various domains such as knowledge discovery
and management, databases or information retrieval
where some relevant concepts, i.e. possible corre-
spondences between objects and attributes are con-
sidered either as classifiers, clusters or representative
object/attribute subsets.
With the increasing size of data, a set of meth-
ods have been proposed in order to either generate
a subset (rather than the whole set) of concepts and
their neighborhood in an on-line and interactive way
(Ferr
´
e, 2014; Visani et al., 2011) or better display lat-
tices using nested line diagrams (Ganter and Wille,
1999). Such approaches become inefficient when
contexts are huge. However, the main idea of lat-
tice/context decomposition into smaller ones is still
relevant when the classification property of the ini-
tial lattice is maintained. Many lattice decomposi-
tions have been defined and studied, either from an
algebraic point of view (Demel, 1982; Mih
´
ok and
Semani
˜
sin, 2008) or from an FCA point of view
(Ganter and Wille, 1999; Funk et al., 1995). We
can cite the Unique Factorisation Theorem (Mih
´
ok
and Semani
˜
sin, 2008), the matrix decomposition (Be-
lohlavek and Vychodil, 2010), the Atlas decomposi-
tion (Ganter and Wille, 1999), the subtensorial de-
composition (Ganter and Wille, 1999), the subdirect
decomposition (Demel, 1982; Freese, 2008; Freese,
1997; Freese, 1999; Wille, 1969; Wille, 1976; Wille,
1983; Wille, 1987; Funk et al., 1995), or the doubling
convex construction. The doubling convex construc-
tion has also been widely studied (Day, 1994; Na-
tion, 1995; Geyer, 1994; Bertet and Caspard, 2002),
mainly from a theoretical point of view in order to
characterize lattices that can be obtained by such de-
composition.
In this paper, we investigate a new method named
reverse doubling construction to reduce the size of
data. In other words, we propose a new method to
construct a smaller lattice from a given one. It is
based on the previous work of Day about the dou-
bling convex construction (Day, 1977; Day, 1994).
Such a method has then be generalized (Geyer, 1994)
and further widely studied (Day et al., 1989; Nation,
1995; Bertet and Caspard, 2002). Intuitively, this con-
struction consists in doubling into a lattice L a convex
subset C of nodes of L. In this paper, we propose a
“reverse doubling construction” which aims at remov-
ing from a lattice L a doubled convex set until no du-
350
Viaud, J., Bertet, K., Demko, C. and Missaoui, R..
The Reverse Doubling Construction.
In Proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2015) - Volume 1: KDIR, pages 350-357
ISBN: 978-989-758-158-8
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