Exploring the Boundary Region for Attribute Reduction in Inconsistent Decision Tables

Abstract

Attribute reduction is one of the key issues for data preprocess in data mining. Many heuristic attribute reduction algorithms based on discernibility matrix have been proposed for inconsistent decision tables. However, these methods are usually computationally time-consuming. To address this issue, the derived consistent decision tables are defined for different definitions of relative reducts. The computations for different reducts of the original inconsistent decision tables are converted into the computations for their corresponding reducts of the derived consistent datasets. The relationships among different core sets and attribute reducts are further discussed. The relative discernibility object pair and the more optimal relative discernibility degree from view of the boundary region are designed to accelerate the attribute reduction process. An efficient attribute reduction framework using relative discernibility degree is proposed for large datasets. Experimental results show that our attribute reduction algorithms are effective and feasible for large inconsistent datasets.