Incremental approaches to updating attribute reducts when refining and coarsening coverings

Abstract: In a dynamic environment, knowledge reduction of information systems with variations of object sets, attribute sets and attribute values is an important topic of rough set theory, and related family-based attribute reduction of dynamic covering information systems when refining and coarsening coverings has attracted little attention. In this paper, firstly, we introduce the concepts of the refinement and coarsening of a covering and provide the mechanisms of updating related families of dynamic covering decision information systems with refining and coarsening coverings. Meanwhile, we investigate how to construct attribute reducts with the updated related families and propose the incremental algorithms for computing attribute reducts of dynamic covering decision information systems. Finally, the experimental results verify that the proposed algorithms are more effective than the non-incremental algorithms for attribute reduction of dynamic covering decision information systems in terms of stability and computational time.