An efficient conflict analysis method based on splitting and merging of formal contexts

Abstract

Conflict situations are widespread nearly in all corners of social life, and the efficiency of conflict analysis still has much room especially for large-scale data sets. To this end, this study presents an information fusion method of fast conflict analysis based on formal concept analysis. Firstly, a novel type of three-way concepts is defined to neatly deal with three-valued formal contexts. Then, fast computation of conflict analysis is explored by using an information fusion technique. Specifically, conflict analysis based on horizontal splitting and merging of formal contexts and the one based on vertical splitting and merging of formal contexts are respectively investigated. Finally, systematic experiments are carried out on both synthetic data sets and real cases to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. According to the experimental results, conflict analysis based on vertical splitting and merging of formal contexts can effectively improve the performance, which may not be realized by using the horizontal splitting and merging strategy in some cases. This study may shed light on formal concept analysis based multi-source big data analysis.