Novel algorithms of attribute reduction for variable precision rough set

Abstract

The main application of variable precision rough set is to perform attribute reduction for databases. In variable precision rough set, the approach of discernibility matrix is theoretical foundation of finding reducts. In this paper, we observe that only minimal elements in the discernibility matrix is sufficient to find reducts, and every minimal element in the discernibility matrix is determined by one equivalence class pair relative to condition attributes at least; this fact motivates our idea in this paper to search the connection between this kind of pair and the minimal element in the discernibility matrix. By the connection between them, we develop the novel algorithms of finding reducts, which improve the existing ones in terms of discernibility matrix.