Discrete temporal transitions occur in a variety of domains, but this work is
mainly motivated by applications in molecular biology: explaining and analyzing
observed transcriptome and proteome time series by literature and database
knowledge. The starting point of a formal concept analysis model is presented.
The objects of a formal context are states of the interesting entities, and the
attributes are the variable properties defining the current state (e.g.
observed presence or absence of proteins). Temporal transitions assign a
relation to the objects, defined by deterministic or non-deterministic
transition rules between sets of pre- and postconditions. This relation can be
generalized to its transitive closure, i.e. states are related if one results
from the other by a transition sequence of arbitrary length. The focus of the
work is the adaptation of the attribute exploration algorithm to such a
relational context, so that questions concerning temporal dependencies can be
asked during the exploration process and be answered from the computed stem
base. Results are given for the abstract example of a game and a small gene
regulatory network relevant to a biomedical question.Comment: Only the email address and reference have been replace