A Noise-tolerant Approach to Fuzzy-Rough Feature Selection

In rough set based feature selection, the goal is to omit attributes (features) from decision systems such that objects in different decision classes can still be discerned. A popular way to evaluate attribute subsets with respect to this criterion is based on the notion of dependency degree. In the standard approach, attributes are expected to be qualitative; in the presence of quantitative attributes, the methodology can be generalized using fuzzy rough sets, to handle gradual (in)discernibility between attribute values more naturally. However, both the extended approach, as well as its crisp counterpart, exhibit a strong sensitivity to noise: a change in a single object may significantly influence the outcome of the reduction procedure. Therefore, in this paper, we consider a more flexible methodology based on the recently introduced Vaguely Quantified Rough Set (VQRS) model. The method can handle both crisp (discrete-valued) and fuzzy (real-valued) data, and encapsulates the existing noise-tolerant data reduction approach using Variable Precision Rough Sets (VPRS), as well as the traditional rough set model, as special cases

Knowledge Granulation, Rough Entropy and Uncertainty Measure in Incomplete Fuzzy Information System

Many real world problems deal with ordering of objects instead of classifying objects, although most of research in data analysis has been focused on the latter. One of the extensions of classical rough sets to take into account the ordering properties is dominance-based rough sets approach which is mainly based on substitution of the indiscernibility relation by a dominance relation. In this paper, we address knowledge measures and reduction in incomplete fuzzy information system using the approach. Firstly, new definitions of knowledge granulation and rough entropy are given, and some important properties of them are investigated. Then, dominance matrix about the measures knowledge granulation and rough entropy is obtained, which could be used to eliminate the redundant attributes in incomplete fuzzy information system. Lastly, a matrix algorithm for knowledge reduction is proposed. An example illustrates the validity of this method and shows the method is applicable to complex fuzzy system. Experiments are also made to show the performance of the newly proposed algorithm

Fuzzy-Rough Sets Assisted Attribute Selection

Attribute selection (AS) refers to the problem of selecting those input attributes or features that are most predictive of a given outcome; a problem encountered in many areas such as machine learning, pattern recognition and signal processing. Unlike other dimensionality reduction methods, attribute selectors preserve the original meaning of the attributes after reduction. This has found application in tasks that involve datasets containing huge numbers of attributes (in the order of tens of thousands) which, for some learning algorithms, might be impossible to process further. Recent examples include text processing and web content classification. AS techniques have also been applied to small and medium-sized datasets in order to locate the most informative attributes for later use. One of the many successful applications of rough set theory has been to this area. The rough set ideology of using only the supplied data and no other information has many benefits in AS, where most other methods require supplementary knowledge. However, the main limitation of rough set-based attribute selection in the literature is the restrictive requirement that all data is discrete. In classical rough set theory, it is not possible to consider real-valued or noisy data. This paper investigates a novel approach based on fuzzy-rough sets, fuzzy rough feature selection (FRFS), that addresses these problems and retains dataset semantics. FRFS is applied to two challenging domains where a feature reducing step is important; namely, web content classification and complex systems monitoring. The utility of this approach is demonstrated and is compared empirically with several dimensionality reducers. In the experimental studies, FRFS is shown to equal or improve classification accuracy when compared to the results from unreduced data. Classifiers that use a lower dimensional set of attributes which are retained by fuzzy-rough reduction outperform those that employ more attributes returned by the existing crisp rough reduction method. In addition, it is shown that FRFS is more powerful than the other AS techniques in the comparative study

Coevolutionary fuzzy attribute order reduction with complete attribute-value space tree

Since big data sets are structurally complex, high-dimensional, and their attributes exhibit some redundant and irrelevant information, the selection, evaluation, and combination of those large-scale attributes pose huge challenges to traditional methods. Fuzzy rough sets have emerged as a powerful vehicle to deal with uncertain and fuzzy attributes in big data problems that involve a very large number of variables to be analyzed in a very short time. In order to further overcome the inefficiency of traditional algorithms in the uncertain and fuzzy big data, in this paper we present a new coevolutionary fuzzy attribute order reduction algorithm (CFAOR) based on a complete attribute-value space tree. A complete attribute-value space tree model of decision table is designed in the attribute space to adaptively prune and optimize the attribute order tree. The fuzzy similarity of multimodality attributes can be extracted to satisfy the needs of users with the better convergence speed and classification performance. Then, the decision rule sets generate a series of rule chains to form an efficient cascade attribute order reduction and classification with a rough entropy threshold. Finally, the performance of CFAOR is assessed with a set of benchmark problems that contain complex high dimensional datasets with noise. The experimental results demonstrate that CFAOR can achieve the higher average computational efficiency and classification accuracy, compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, CFAOR is applied to extract different tissues surfaces of dynamical changing infant cerebral cortex and it achieves a satisfying consistency with those of medical experts, which shows its potential significance for the disorder prediction of infant cerebrum

Computing fuzzy rough approximations in large scale information systems

Rough set theory is a popular and powerful machine learning tool. It is especially suitable for dealing with information systems that exhibit inconsistencies, i.e. objects that have the same values for the conditional attributes but a different value for the decision attribute. In line with the emerging granular computing paradigm, rough set theory groups objects together based on the indiscernibility of their attribute values. Fuzzy rough set theory extends rough set theory to data with continuous attributes, and detects degrees of inconsistency in the data. Key to this is turning the indiscernibility relation into a gradual relation, acknowledging that objects can be similar to a certain extent. In very large datasets with millions of objects, computing the gradual indiscernibility relation (or in other words, the soft granules) is very demanding, both in terms of runtime and in terms of memory. It is however required for the computation of the lower and upper approximations of concepts in the fuzzy rough set analysis pipeline. Current non-distributed implementations in R are limited by memory capacity. For example, we found that a state of the art non-distributed implementation in R could not handle 30,000 rows and 10 attributes on a node with 62GB of memory. This is clearly insufficient to scale fuzzy rough set analysis to massive datasets. In this paper we present a parallel and distributed solution based on Message Passing Interface (MPI) to compute fuzzy rough approximations in very large information systems. Our results show that our parallel approach scales with problem size to information systems with millions of objects. To the best of our knowledge, no other parallel and distributed solutions have been proposed so far in the literature for this problem

Intertemporal Choice of Fuzzy Soft Sets

This paper first merges two noteworthy aspects of choice. On the one hand, soft sets and fuzzy soft sets are popular models that have been largely applied to decision making problems, such as real estate valuation, medical diagnosis (glaucoma, prostate cancer, etc.), data mining, or international trade. They provide crisp or fuzzy parameterized descriptions of the universe of alternatives. On the other hand, in many decisions, costs and benefits occur at different points in time. This brings about intertemporal choices, which may involve an indefinitely large number of periods. However, the literature does not provide a model, let alone a solution, to the intertemporal problem when the alternatives are described by (fuzzy) parameterizations. In this paper, we propose a novel soft set inspired model that applies to the intertemporal framework, hence it fills an important gap in the development of fuzzy soft set theory. An algorithm allows the selection of the optimal option in intertemporal choice problems with an infinite time horizon. We illustrate its application with a numerical example involving alternative portfolios of projects that a public administration may undertake. This allows us to establish a pioneering intertemporal model of choice in the framework of extended fuzzy set theorie