Covering rough sets based on neighborhoods: An approach without using neighborhoods

Rough set theory, a mathematical tool to deal with inexact or uncertain knowledge in information systems, has originally described the indiscernibility of elements by equivalence relations. Covering rough sets are a natural extension of classical rough sets by relaxing the partitions arising from equivalence relations to coverings. Recently, some topological concepts such as neighborhood have been applied to covering rough sets. In this paper, we further investigate the covering rough sets based on neighborhoods by approximation operations. We show that the upper approximation based on neighborhoods can be defined equivalently without using neighborhoods. To analyze the coverings themselves, we introduce unary and composition operations on coverings. A notion of homomorphismis provided to relate two covering approximation spaces. We also examine the properties of approximations preserved by the operations and homomorphisms, respectively.Comment: 13 pages; to appear in International Journal of Approximate Reasonin

Homomorphisms between fuzzy information systems revisited

Recently, Wang et al. discussed the properties of fuzzy information systems under homomorphisms in the paper [C. Wang, D. Chen, L. Zhu, Homomorphisms between fuzzy information systems, Applied Mathematics Letters 22 (2009) 1045-1050], where homomorphisms are based upon the concepts of consistent functions and fuzzy relation mappings. In this paper, we classify consistent functions as predecessor-consistent and successor-consistent, and then proceed to present more properties of consistent functions. In addition, we improve some characterizations of fuzzy relation mappings provided by Wang et al.Comment: 10 page